Aubrey Plaza Opens Up About Grief on Amy Poehler’s Podcast
by Opheli Garcia Lawler · Cracked.comHer husband Jeff Baena died in January 2025
August 19, 2025
Aubrey Plaza is stepping into the world again to promote her forthcoming film with Margaret Qualley, Honey Don’t! following the death of her husband Jeff Baena in January. Since then, Plaza has understandably had very limited engagement with the public. As part of the press tour for the new film, in theaters on August 22nd, Plaza appeared on Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast. While the interview discussed Plaza’s love for basketball, her days as an NBC page and the time Poehler and Plaza spent on the set of SNL, the interview started with Plaza addressing her husband’s death for the first time.
Poehler broached the subject within the first few minutes of the interview. “People want to see you. I want to see how you are. They love you,” Poehler said. “You’ve had this terrible, terrible, tragic year. You lost your husband. You’ve been dealing with that, and you’ve been looking for all different ways in which to feel and find support. And I think I would on behalf of all the people who feel like they know you and the people who do know you, how are you feeling today?”
“I mean right in this very very present moment I feel happy to be with you,” Plaza responded, slowly. “Overall, I’m here and I’m functioning and I feel you know, like I feel really grateful to be moving through the world.”
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She compared her grief to the Apple TV+ movie The Gorge, starring Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy.
“There’s like a cliff on one side and then there’s a cliff on the other side and 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 is what my grief is like. Or what grief could be — where it’s like at all times there’s a giant ocean of just awfulness that’s right there. I can see it, and sometimes I just want to just dive into it and just be in it. Then sometimes I just look at it. And then sometimes I just try to get away from it, but it’s always there.”
“That’s such an accurate depiction of grief,” one person wrote in the YouTube comments of the episode. “I appreciate her vulnerability and love seeing her laugh and just hang out with a good friend right now.”
To that latter point, Poehler, as much as she’s just another celebrity with a podcast, did seem like the perfect person to steer Plaza through this conversation, as she was able to perfectly balance genuine concern, candor and privacy.
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