Aubrey Plaza

She got the role that made her famous by staring at a TV producer in silence for an entire meeting. Mike Schur walked out so unsettled he built April Ludgate around her. Parks and Recreation ran from 2009 to 2015, and Plaza's deadpan intern became one of the show's most beloved characters. But she'd earned that stare. Before the meeting, she trained at Upright Citizens Brigade, worked as an NBC page giving tours with entirely made-up facts, and had survived a stroke at 20 that temporarily robbed her of speech. Getting the role wasn't luck. It was damage weaponized.

For years, Hollywood kept trying to hand her the same deadpan weirdo role. She kept finding ways to make it interesting, then eventually stopped accepting it. Emily the Criminal (2022) was a turning point: Plaza produced and starred in a lean, brutal thriller about debt and desperation that landed a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. The same year, Mike White wrote Harper in The White Lotus Season 2 specifically for her, and critics lost their minds a little. Emmy nom, Golden Globe nom, TIME 100. The joke about her being a one-note actress aged badly.

She's half Puerto Rican on her father's side, with a grandfather who emigrated from Arecibo, and she's spoken publicly about her Taino and Basque roots. She's bisexual and has said so plainly in interviews. Her Twitter handle is @evilhag. In 2013, she crashed the MTV Movie Awards stage during Will Ferrell's speech in a move that felt completely in character. She was student council president at her all-girls Catholic high school in Delaware, which really does explain everything. Her next move is playing Heidi Fleiss in a biopic she's also producing.