Aubrey Plaza has broken her silence on the passing of her husband, Jeff Baena.
The actress appeared on Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast on Tuesday, where she spoke candidly about navigating grief.
“Right in this very, very present moment, I feel happy to be with you,” Plaza told Poehler, her former co-star on Parks and Recreation. “I’m here and I’m functioning and I feel really grateful to be moving through the world. I’m okay, but it’s a daily struggle, obviously.”
Plaza then used a “really dumb analogy” to describe the grief she experiences, likening it to the 2025 horror film The Gorge starring Miles Teller.
“In the movie, there’s like a cliff on one side and there’s a cliff on the other side, then there’s gorge in between and it’s filled with all these like monster people that are trying to get them,” Plaza explained.
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“I swear when I watched it, I was like that feels like what my grief is like … or what grief could be like.”
“At all times there’s like a giant ocean of awfulness, that’s like right there and I can see it. Sometimes I just want to dive into it, and just like be in it. Then sometimes I just look at it, and sometimes I try to get away from it. But, it’s always there, and the monster people are trying to get me like Miles Teller.”
Baena, a screenwriter and director, died by suicide on January 3rd, 2025, at the age of 47.
Aubrey Plaza opens up about losing her husband this year on Amy Poehler’s ‘Good Hang’ podcast. pic.twitter.com/tKsQpCoN37
— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) August 19, 2025
