Aubrey Plaza got her Parks and Recreation role through a meeting that began as an exploratory conversation, not a formal audition. While she was in Los Angeles for Funny People, casting director Allison Jones sent her to meet the show’s creators, Mike Schur and Greg Daniels. Plaza pitched an apathetic college intern as a comic counterweight to Leslie Knope’s enthusiasm. The creators wrote the character into the pilot, but Plaza later auditioned for the network.
Why Plaza was meeting the creators
Plaza was in Los Angeles for a chemistry read for Judd Apatow’s Funny People. She had already gone through a process that, by her later account, included filming a stand-up set and a chemistry read. Casting director Allison Jones was working across projects and arranged other meetings for Plaza while she was in town, including one with Parks and Recreation creators Mike Schur and Greg Daniels. Plaza recalled that she did not realize the meeting might lead to a role. The New Yorker interview
Plaza was a fan of The Office and remembered being distracted by seeing its cast around the set where she met Schur and Daniels. The meeting was exploratory: the creators discussed a possible assistant for Leslie Knope, played by Amy Poehler, and Plaza responded with an idea for a very different kind of colleague.
The character idea Plaza brought to the meeting
Plaza suggested that Leslie’s assistant could be a college intern working for credit who had little interest in parks and recreation. In her recollection to The New Yorker, she put it this way: “Well, what if the character is an intern, and she’s just doing it for college credit? She’s really good at it, but she doesn’t give a shit about parks and rec at all.” This is Plaza recalling her pitch later, not a contemporaneous transcript. The New Yorker
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The comic contrast was the point: Leslie approached civic work with deep, earnest enthusiasm, while the intern would be capable but unmoved by it. Plaza has connected the idea to her own experience with internships and temp jobs, as well as to her younger sister. In a separate interview, she also described the contrast between Leslie and the character she proposed. Backstage
How the meeting turned into a role—and why an audition still followed
Plaza said Schur and Daniels wrote her into the pilot based on that conversation. The early version of the character was named Aubrey and was written as a heightened version of Plaza herself. But the meeting did not mean the part was fully secured: Plaza said she still had to audition to play herself because the network did not know her. The New Yorker The New Yorker interview
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So the accurate version is neither “Plaza never auditioned” nor “she won the part at a routine audition.” Her account describes two stages: a creative meeting where she helped shape the character concept, followed by a network audition.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What Schur later said about Plaza
In a later Television Academy interview, Schur praised Jones’s casting instincts and recalled saying of Plaza, “Aubrey is gonna win an Oscar someday.” That is Schur’s retrospective praise, not evidence that this remark was made during the original casting decision or a detailed account of how the network audition was judged. Television Academy
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