Aubrey Plaza made a rare public appearance as a guest on Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast, where she briefly discussed the grief she’s experienced since her husband Jeff Baena died by suicide in January.
“Overall, I’m here and I’m functioning,” Plaza told Poehler, who asked about her “terrible, terrible, tragic year” early in the episode. “I feel really grateful to be moving through the world. I think I’m okay, but it’s a daily struggle, obviously.”
Plaza and Baena married in 2021 after dating for 10 years. During their impromptu ceremony, the couple wore self-made tie-dye clothes, a call back to one of their pandemic pastimes. When Plaza made her first appearance after his death at the Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary special in February, she wore a tie-dye shirt.
Plaza used a film comparison to explain what her navigation of grief has been like, prefacing, “This is a really dumb analogy and it was kind of a joke at a certain point, but I actually mean it. Did you see that movie The Gorge?”
The 2025 film stars Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy as sniper guards stationed at the gorge, a pit of mutated and monstrous creatures. “In the movie, there’s a cliff on one side and there’s a cliff on the other side, then there’s a gorge in between and it’s filled with all these monster people that are trying to get them,” Plaza explained.
“I swear when I watched it, I was like that feels like what my grief is like,” she said, “or what grief could be like.” Her grief fills her personal gorge, but there are times when she feels as though she’s positioned on either cliff.
“At all times there’s like a giant ocean of awfulness, that’s like right there and I can see it,” she said. “Sometimes I just want to dive into it, and just be in it. Then sometimes I just look at it, and sometimes I try to get away from it. But it’s always there. It’s just always there, and the monster people are trying to get me like Miles Teller.”
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Plaza has found support in her friends, who keep her laughing. “My group of my women friends, we were in an all girl improv group but then we turned into a coven legit — we call ourselves Bombardo,” she said. “We have like a text chain, and we do Zooms and we do trips. Those girls make me laugh really, really hard. Also, we’ve all known each other for so long. The best thing that makes me laugh is just all my funny friends.”
From Rolling Stone US
