A lot of stars were born or brightened on the last gasp of NBC’s Thursday-night comedy lineup in the 2000s and early 2010s: Steve Carell, Donald Glover, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Chris Pratt, John Krasinski, and Alison Brie all emerged from their various sitcoms a much bigger deal than they were beforehand. For most of them, this has also included a movie career; Chris Pratt even reached some kind of blockbuster level by starring in the Jurassic World and Guardians of the Galaxy trilogies. Yet in 2024, the true movie-star success story of this bunch doesn’t seem like Pratt, or Quiet Place auteur Krasinski, or occasional big-screeners like Carell or Fey. The movie star of this group is Aubrey Plaza.

By the most traditional definition, of course, Plaza is not a “real” movie star. Her name does not appear above the title on posters for movies that then open to $20 or $30 million based on her name alone. In fact, there have been very few Aubrey Plaza vehicles, per se. The recent My Old Ass, which is now streaming on Prime Video following its theatrical run this fall, looks like a buddy comedy between a teenage girl (Maisy Stella) and her adult self (Plaza), but it turns out Plaza only has 10 or 15 minutes of screen time. Her other projects this year have all been supporting gigs: She stole scenes as Wow Platinum, the sexed-up, sensationalist journalist in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, which is about to hit VOD this week; and stole some more scenes, plus hearts, as a witchy incarnation of Death on Agatha All Along, which is streaming on Disney+ following its recently completed first season.

Since when is mere scene-stealing a case for genuine movie stardom, you might ask? Stephen McKinley Henderson steals scenes, and he’s not a movie star, no matter how fervently we might wish otherwise. But Plaza feels different, maybe because she seems attuned (whether accidentally or calculatingly) to how movie stardom has changed over the past decade, and intensely self-aware about the ridiculousness of play-acting. This goes back to Parks and Recreation, where her character April was built on a youthful disaffection – she read as a teenager, even though Plaza herself was already in her mid-twenties – but could also ruthlessly inhabit alternate personas, like aristocratic widow Janet Snakehole. The point wasn’t Plaza’s chameleonic virtuosity, but her boundless confidence in her persona across a variety of roles, whether real (parks-department intern; animal-control worker) or imagined (Janet Snakehole; Judy Hitler).

In short, she’s doing exactly what a movie star does – only in some ways, Plaza goes further. What she and her characters are willing to do, often in the guise of parody or irony, gives her a kind of heedless range unavailable to a more tightly managed persona. How many millennial actresses could so convincingly appear to be having a ball opposite Jason Statham in a Mission: Impossible knockoff like Operation Fortune? Across capers, comedies, and dramas, Plaza hustles and wills herself into a kind of fake-it-til-you-make-it situation – and that’s true of her strongest characters, too. Ingrid Goes West follows a young woman living with such desperate parasocial neediness that she’s able to become influencer-adjacent through stalking. Emily the Criminal, an indie picture out of Sundance that did well enough on streaming to inspire an upcoming TV adaptation, is about a young woman frustrated with the prospect of student loans and unpaid internships who turns to a life of crime – and turns out to be pretty good at it, at least until a point. This makes her perfect casting for Wow Platinum, a character pitched somewhere between ’40s screwball, Ayn Rand melodrama, and Fifth Element-style sci-fi absurdity. 

The only problem with Plaza’s command of the screen – and a major reason she belongs on big ones, not TV shows binged on your phone – is that she can upset a project’s gravitational pull (again, something she has in common with more traditional movie stars). She’s so good in My Old Ass, goofing on her words-of-wisdom position while also offering sincere advice and eventually the movie’s emotional lynchpin, that her long absence from the movie’s middle feels glaring, no matter how well Maisy Stella acquits herself on her own. Imagine if Emma Stone or Margot Robbie just disappeared for 45 minutes after coming on like the co-star of a movie; My Old Ass works on a smaller scale, but the void Plaza leaves is similar. She also throws Agatha All Along into a circular tizzy whenever she’s off-screen, which is often. When she steals scenes on this Marvel show – in one late-season moment, she even finds a sexier and more electric way of sitting than her scene partners – it doesn’t feel like she ever gives them back, because the MCU has become so accustomed to feeding actors into its gears. Actresses as formidable as Kathryn Hahn and Patti LuPone often felt constrained by the show’s limited imagination, bland characterization, and snail’s pace; Plaza showed no such difficulty in chewing things up and spitting ’em back out.

The DGAF energy that a movie star should have toward a vast web of franchising no longer seems available to today’s wannabe leading men and women (at least not any who dip into the franchises in the first place). Plaza keeps it alive, and as a result feels genuinely glamorous in even the most ridiculous roles, despite her TV roots. Many of her NBC sitcom alumni – even/especially Pratt – struggle with the feeling of doing sitcom shtick on a bigger canvas. Like a lot of attention-grabbing stars, Plaza brings her own canvas wherever she goes.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.