Aubrey Plaza takes pride in the fact that her main character in Emily the Criminal doesn’t need guns to get the job done.
The film Emily the criminal managed to be a compelling thriller without the main character using firearms to fight his way through the story. In the film, released last year by director John Patton Ford, Aubrey Plaza plays a young woman who launches a new career in crime when she is deeply in debt with student loans. While many others in her position would struggle due to the hazards of the job, Plaza’s Emily goes in without weapons, making for some rather tense scenes.
Talked about the movie in a new interview for The tonight show (through IndieWire), Plaza elaborated on Emily’s gunless approach to her crimes Emily the criminal. The actress says she’s “proud” to play this character who can manage without them, and better yet, Plaza also thinks keeping the guns out of Emily’s hands was a much better story. As Plaza said to Jimmy Fallon:
“I was kind of proud of that, because I don’t think you need guns. Most thrillers introduce guns, like immediately… We don’t need guns in every movie. I don’t think it is – it’s a subconsciously something, I think, for the audience to watch that movie and not even realize, like, ‘Oh, there’s no guns.’ But I think it actually makes it more terrifying because you think, ‘How is she going to take these guys down without a gun like that?’
Emily the criminal taught Aubrey Plaza a thing or two about crime
Along with co-star Theo Rossi, Plaza previously spoke about the film in an exclusive interview with MovieWeb. She explained how, in preparation for her reign, she had to learn exactly how to pull off the scam her character does. She noted how just learning that process “felt very criminal,” and jokes that that knowledge will stay with her forever, maybe come in handy one day.
“We had been rehearsing a lot with the bossing ambassador machine. We had to learn the rules of how the scam worked. That was actually fun because it felt really criminal, and it felt kind of fun counterfeiting fake credit cards, and I feel like that’s a skill I’ll take with me for the rest of my life.
This isn’t to say that we’ll never see Plaza brandishing a firearm on the big screen one day. She previously shared the story of when director Edgar Wright congratulated her on landing the role of Lara Croft in a Tomb Raider movie after mistaking her for that character from a Emily the criminal photo. Plaza told Newsweek last year that while Emily and Lara are very different characters, she would just as easily play the latter. From that interview:
“It was so funny back then [Wright] texted me that because I didn’t realize how strikingly similar those photos look. Emily wears a purse strap and Lara Croft has a gun holster, they are very different. But it’s very weird and totally coincidental, but I take it. I like action movies and I don’t discriminate big movies or small movies. I like all kinds of movies. I’d love it if that somehow became real, but who knows, I have no idea. That’s an iconic character. She’s the original badass.”