Aubrey Plaza knows how complicated it is to work with your partner. She has filmed multiple projects, like Life After Beth, Joshy and The Little Hours, with her partner, filmmaker Jeff Baena. Now Plaza is starring and producing the movie Black Bear, a  comedy-drama thrille that takes place in a remote location in the Adirondack Mountains where her character and her character’s partner are looking for inspiration for a film. 

“Lawrence Levine, the director of this film is also married to a filmmaker. One of the things that motivated Larry to write the script was kind of our conversations about how complicated it is to work with your partner,” Plaza told HFPA journalist Nellee Holmes.

The Delaware native and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts graduate admits that the film is very personal for her and for the director.

“I think the film is in a lot of ways a kind of examination and deconstruction of the worst version of that kind of toxic dynamic that can happen between two people that are in a relationship that are also in an artistic endeavor and kind of what happens when you blur the lines of reality and creative exploration and what is more important in the end kind of thing.”

Listen to the podcast and hear how she feels being named after the song; how was her experience at an all-girl Catholic school; how was it growing up in a multicultural family; what kind of student she was; on Parks And Recreation she played a character that wasn’t easily impressed but how is she in real life?; why she likes improv; how long did it take her to recover from a stroke she had in her 20s; and how was her life in her early days in Los Angeles.