Grief is a fickle beast. One minute you think you’re fine and the next you are completely consumed by it. They’ll tell you that you can move on quickly but few ever do. And Aubrey Plaza’s explanation of her grief is the first time I felt someone get it.
Plaza has been dealing with the tragic loss of her late husband, Jeff Baena, this year. For the most part, she has not done interviews or press and hasn’t been in the public eye much. In preparation for the release of her film Honey Don’t starring opposite Margaret Qualley, Plaza went on Good Hang with Amy Poehler and reunited with her Parks and Recreation co-star.
While talking, Poehler asked Plaza how she was doing and Plaza said that she was there and present and each day was different. But what really resonated with me was how Plaza explained her grief. She compared what she felt to the 2025 film The Gorge starring Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy.
“In the movie, there’s a cliff on one side and a cliff on the other side, and a gorge in between that’s filled with monster people trying to get them,” Plaza told Poehler. “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 a giant ocean of awfulness that’s right there and I can see it. Sometimes I just want to dive into it and be in it, and sometimes I look at it. Sometimes I try to get away from it. It’s always there, and the monster people are trying to get me — like Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy.”
Grief isn’t something you just move on from
The Gorge analogy is pretty great when it comes to grief. Everyone praised then mocked the line “What is grief if not love persevering?” from WandaVision but that ties into what Plaza said about feeling like The Gorge. Some days, you are on top of it and looking down at your grief and other days, you’re fighting it off and things seem dire.
It has been almost 4 years since I lost my dad. Some believe that you should be able to cope daily after a certain amount of time but still there are days when I just long to call him, tell him about things he’s missed. It is never ending and does, as Plaza said, feel like you sometimes just want to dive into it and live in it.
We don’t often talk about our grief after the fact. Just in the moment and no one really asks how you’re doing after the fact. And it can feel lonely and isolating but to hear how Plaza described her own grief made me (and I am sure others) feel less alone in our own. Maybe we don’t all feel like we’re the movie The Gorge but we can all relate to being lost in our grief from time to time.
(featured image: Good Hang with Amy Poehler)
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