Aubrey Plaza Compares Grief to the Miles Teller Sci-Fi Horror Film ‘The Gorge’

"I swear when I watched it, I was like that feels like what my grief is like…or what grief could be like," Plaza told Amy Poehler of the film, which co-stars Anya Taylor-Joy.

By Audra Heinrichs  |  August 19, 2025 | 5:11pm
Screenshot: Good Hang Celebrities
Aubrey Plaza Compares Grief to the Miles Teller Sci-Fi Horror Film ‘The Gorge’

It’s been just seven months since Aubrey Plaza lost her partner of 14 years, writer and director Jeff Baena. Now, the actress is publicly speaking on navigating grief for the first time. Joining Amy Poehler’s podcast, Good Hang, Plaza shared that she’s taking things one day at a time.

“Right in this very, very present moment, I feel happy to be with you,” Plaza told Poehler. “Overall, I’m here and I’m functioning. I feel really grateful to be moving through the world. I think I’m OK, but it’s like a daily struggle, obviously.”

Baena died by suicide in January. At the time, Plaza issued a joint statement with his family, calling his death an “unimaginable tragedy.” The statement continued: “We are deeply grateful to everyone who has offered support. Please respect our privacy during this time.” Since then, Plaza has largely remained out of the public eye save for promoting her latest film, Honey Don’t!. Fortunately, she’s found a proper comparison for navigating grief.

“This is a really dumb analogy and it was kind of a joke at a certain point, but I actually mean it. Did you see that movie The Gorge?” Plaza asked Poehler.

“It’s like [an] alien movie or something with 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,” she explained. “I swear when I watched it, I was like that feels like what my grief is like…or what grief could be like.”

Frankly, that’s one of the nicer things I’ve ever read about that film. A film critic for The Guardian, for instance, wrote: “Despite looking like it was based on a video game that your younger brother obsessively plays, The Gorge is in fact an original, or whatever that word means when the plot and aesthetic feel like they’ve been stitched together from so many other films.” Clearly, it worked wonders for Plaza.

“At all times there’s like a giant ocean of awfulness, that’s like right there and I can see it,” Plaza said of coping with the loss. “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.”

Among the other topics Plaza and Poehler discussed were witches: “I feel like I have ancestral witches in my life.”; how janky the White House is: “It’s janky as fuck.”; and her love of movies: “I don’t need anything else or anyone else.” Fortunately, one critic’s trash is another woman’s relief from grief.

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