Aubrey Plaza is pregnant with her first child. Her representative confirmed the news Tuesday to People, identifying actor Christopher Abbott as her partner and the father. The baby is due in the fall.
A source described the news in terms that reflect what the past year has actually been for Plaza, “It was a beautiful surprise after an emotional year. They feel very blessed.”
Plaza, 41, has not made a public statement of her own. The confirmation came through her representative, and no additional details, the baby’s sex, a specific due date, or any further comment from either Plaza or Abbott, have been provided.
Plaza’s Horrible 2025
January 3, 2025, is the year the source is describing as emotional. That is the day Jeff Baena, Plaza’s husband, her creative partner of more than a decade, the filmmaker she had worked with on Life After Beth, The Little Hours, and Spin Me Round, was found dead at his Los Angeles home by his dog walker.
He was 47. The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner ruled his death a suicide.
Plaza and Baena had met at a game night in 2011, specifically, a game of Balderdash, and began dating.
They worked together repeatedly across the following decade, making films and building a creative life that was inseparable from their personal one.
Baena proposed to Plaza at a site connected to the Basque witch trials in Zugarramurdi. They married in 2021 in a small ceremony in their own backyard.
They quietly separated in September 2024, after what was described as marital difficulties.
Plaza moved to New York. One month after the separation, Baena made remarks that Plaza described to investigators as concerning, and she called a friend to perform a welfare check on him.
He began attending therapy in October 2024. Plaza received a text message from Baena three hours before his body was discovered. They had spoken by phone the night before.
Plaza released a joint statement with his family calling his death “an unimaginable tragedy.”
She withdrew from presenting at the 2025 Golden Globes, which were scheduled two days after his death.
She did not speak publicly about what she was going through until August 2025, when she appeared on Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast.
“Overall, I’m here and I’m functioning,” she told Poehler. “I feel really grateful to be moving through the world. I think I’m OK, but it’s a daily struggle, obviously.”
She likened her grief to the 2025 film The Gorge:
“There’s like a cliff on one side and there’s a cliff on the other side, then there’s gorge in between. Where at all times there’s like a giant ocean of awfulness, that’s right there and I can see it. 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.”
That podcast appearance was in August 2025. By February 2026, seven months later, she was photographed at New York Fashion Week at the Khaite Fall/Winter 2026 show on Valentine’s Day, seated next to Christopher Abbott.
In March 2026 she attended Paris Fashion Week. In retrospect, she was noted for wearing loose-fitting clothing at both events.
Who Is Christopher Abbott?
Christopher Jacob Abbott was born February 10, 1986, in Greenwich, Connecticut. He is 40 years old.
He grew up in the working-class Chickahominy neighborhood of Greenwich and worked at a local video store while developing an interest in acting.
He attended the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts in New York.
Most people who recognize Abbott know him first as Charlie Dattolo, the quietly intense boyfriend who walks away from Hannah in the early seasons of Girls on HBO.
That role, which he played from 2012, established him as an actor of unusual restraint and interiority. He has spent the years since building one of the more interesting filmographies in independent American cinema.
His credits include James White (2015), which earned him Independent Spirit Award and Gotham Award nominations. A Most Violent Year (2014), Piercing, The World to Come, Possessor, and Bring Them Down.
He received a Golden Globe nomination for his lead role in Hulu’s Catch-22 in 2019.
He appeared in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things in 2023 opposite Emma Stone. He has also appeared in higher-profile mainstream projects including Kraven the Hunter and Wolf Man.
Currently he is starring as Biff Loman in a 2026 Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman at the Winter Garden Theatre, with previews having begun in March.
He is also appearing in the Netflix miniseries East of Eden.
He is, by every account, extremely private. No previous public relationship is on the record for him. He and Plaza had not confirmed their romantic partnership before Tuesday’s announcement.
How Did Plaza And Abbott Get Together?
The working history between Plaza and Abbott dates back to the summer of 2019, when they filmed Black Bear together, a psychological thriller directed by Lawrence Michael Levine that premiered at Sundance in January 2020.
In the film they play creative collaborators caught in a complicated romantic triangle.
The role required them to spend significant time in close creative proximity and to play out an emotionally intense dynamic on screen.
They reunited in 2023 for the off-Broadway revival of Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, John Patrick Shanley’s two-hander about two damaged people finding each other in a Brooklyn bar.
They played love interests. The production ran from October 2023 through January 2024. Plaza had said publicly that Abbott was the only person she could imagine making her stage debut with.
The couple went public in 2025, and were photographed together at New York Fashion Week in February 2026, two months before the pregnancy announcement.
Neither had previously confirmed the relationship in any formal or explicit statement.
Who Is Aubrey Plaza?
Aubrey Christina Plaza was born June 26, 1984, in Wilmington, Delaware. She is 41 years old, of Puerto Rican and Irish descent, the eldest of three sisters.
She attended the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York and graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. At 20, she suffered a stroke, a fact she has disclosed publicly, that temporarily affected her ability to speak and walk. She recovered fully.
Her career breakthrough came in 2009 when she was cast as April Ludgate on NBC’s Parks and Recreation, the deadpan, openly misanthropic intern who became one of the show’s most beloved characters across seven seasons through 2015.
The role made her famous and defined her public persona. y, deadpan, seemingly unbothered, and funnier than almost anyone else in the room.
From there her career expanded in directions that surprised people who had only seen April Ludgate.
Safety Not Guaranteed (2012) revealed her range as a dramatic lead. Ingrid Goes West (2017) was a sharp, disturbing portrait of social media obsession and loneliness.
Emily the Criminal (2022), which she also produced, showed her as a credible action lead carrying a film entirely on her own.
The White Lotus Season 2 in 2022 earned her Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for her performance as Harper Spiller, a tightly wound lawyer unraveling on a luxury vacation in Sicily.
She appeared in Marvel’s Agatha All Along in 2024 and in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis and the comedy My Old Ass, also in 2024.
This will be her first child.
