For a movie called Dirty Grandpa you might expect the casting process to be a little, well, dirty. In this case, perception would be reality, as Aubrey Plaza has said her audition to play Robert De Niro’s love interest in the film was vulgar and graphic. It might seem a little inappropriate for a professional audition to go in that direction, regardless of the lewd aspect of the material. However, this one time, we’ll let it slide as the try-outs descent into depravity was entirely the actress’ choice.
In a recent appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers the former Parks and Recreation actresses spoke in detail about her casting experience. Initially, she had been asked to play the part of Zac Efron’s love interest but Aubrey Plaza was much more interested in working opposite Robert De Niro, because De Niro. In her bid for the role she decided to go above and beyond the call of duty.
I had a plan to flash them. Like, my butt. It was in the script, so it wasn't, like, totally freaky on my part. But, it was. I even had the Parks and Rec makeup department put make up [to] just make sure that my butt was good. And I just went there, and I just threw the script out, I looked into the camera and said a bunch of really dirty things. Then I flashed them. Then I left. And I got it! If you want to be an actor, you just take your clothes off.
While the lesson that Aubrey Plaza learned in her audition may not be the lesson we want young actors to take away from the experience, we can’t argue with the results. Plaza does make it clear that it was a "character choice." It’s not simply that flashing your body is the way to go, rather that simply it’s the way her character would have acted, so it worked for the audition. We can imagine, at the very least, that it was an audition that the producers had a hard time forgetting about, so it worked as far as that went. Check out the full segment below
Aubrey Plaza’s media tour in promotion of Dirty Grandpa has been the single most entertaining thing about the movie, as the movie itself was not nearly as much fun to watch. The details of the actress flashing producers comes on the heels of a story she told Jimmy Kimmel about filming the sex scene with Robert De Niro. There we learned things about the iconic actor that we never needed to know, and are still trying to scrub our brains to remove.
