Aubrey Plaza, her husband's death and the 'wrong way' to grieve.

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When Aubrey Plaza sat down with her former Parks and Recreation co-star Amy Poehler on the Good Hang podcast this week, she did something brave: she spoke publicly for the first time about losing her husband, Jeff Baena, to suicide in January.

In one particular instance, Plaza opened up about her experience with grief and – in true Aubrey Plaza fashion – compared it to the Apple TV+ sci-fi film The Gorge.

"It's an alien movie with Miles Teller. 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. I swear when I watched it I was like, 'That feels like what my grief is like,' or what grief could be like," Plaza explained. 

Watch Aubrey Plaza speaking about her grief. Article continues after video.

"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."

It was raw, it was real, and it made perfect sense to anyone who has ever tried to articulate the indescribable experience of profound loss. But the internet, predictably, had other ideas.

Comments flooded social media criticising Plaza's choice of words and timing. 

"Can somebody tell me why she's not serious about it?" one user wrote on X. 

"She's not even serious about it," another commented. 

"She was with that man a long time. This was too soon, and I'm not sure who to blame," someone else said.

The criticism highlights a deeply troubling societal obsession: our collective belief that there's a "right way" to grieve, and that we're somehow qualified to judge whether someone else is doing it correctly.

Here's the thing about grief: it's messy, unpredictable, and deeply personal. It doesn't follow a timeline or conform to social expectations. For some people, it might look like months of silence. For others, it might involve finding metaphors in sci-fi movies and obscure songs that somehow capture what words alone cannot.

Image: Getty.

Plaza's comparison to The Gorge wasn't flippant or inappropriate — it was actually remarkably insightful. The fact that she found this metaphor in a piece of popular culture doesn't diminish its validity. Grief attaches itself to the strangest things — a song, a smell, a random movie scene — and these connections can provide comfort or understanding in ways that traditional expressions of mourning simply can't.

Since Baena's death, Plaza has been navigating an impossible situation: the public's fixation on knowing when she would speak out, what she would say, how she would behave. 

When she first appeared on Saturday Night Live wearing a tie-dye shirt (symbolic of her husband), people said it was too soon. When she attended Cannes, there were more opinions about her timing and demeanour. 

Now, when she finally opens up in a thoughtful conversation with a close friend, she's criticised for not being serious enough. It's a no-win situation that reveals our uncomfortable relationship with grief as a society. We're simultaneously fascinated by it and repelled by it, wanting to witness it, but only on our terms, in ways that make us comfortable.

What made Plaza's appearance on Good Hang so powerful was the context. This wasn't a tabloid interview or a flippant comment — though, that would also be valid if she chose to do so — it was a conversation between two friends who worked together for years. And Poehler approached the topic with genuine care.

Image: Getty.

"Right in this very, very present moment, I feel happy to be with you. Overall, I'm here and I'm functioning. I feel really grateful to be moving through the world," Plaza said to Poehler during the podcast. 

"I think I'm okay, but it's like a daily struggle, obviously."

Plaza has been slowly reintegrating herself into work and life following her husband's death, and at every step, people have had something to say. But here's the truth: her grief isn't our business. How she processes it, when she talks about it, and what metaphors she uses to describe it are entirely up to her… pop culture references and all. 

Aubrey Plaza doesn't owe us a performance of grief that makes us comfortable. She owes herself the space to heal in whatever way works for her — and yes — even if that involves comparing her experience to a sci-fi movie about monsters in a gorge. 

Because sometimes, that's exactly what grief feels like.

Feature Image: Getty / YouTube/Good Hang with Amy Poehler.