Aubrey Plaza recalls awkward confrontation with Joe Biden: ‘He did not like it. It was crazy’

Aubrey Plaza has detailed her “long-standing feud” with president Joe Biden, and said that she once made his face “go really red”.

Recent Saturday Night Live host Plaza told The New Yorker that she had a go at Biden while at a youth conference when she was just 16 years old.

“The whole point of the conference was to allow students to speak out on different issues,” The White Lotus star explained, after being asked whether she had ever met the president, and revealing that she attended a “Joe Biden youth-leadership conference”, while at high school.

She continued: “They shuttled us from room to room, and there was a different speaker in each room, and it was all leading up to this climax where we were going to sit in the auditorium, and Joe was going to get up on stage and give his speech.”

The reason Aubrey Plaza ended up having a go at Joe Biden, she recalled, was because she did not get the chance to speak, despite the event being “student-centred”.

She explained: “I was really angry about the conference – and I had a stare-down with Joe Biden from the audience, because he asked how it went, and I raised my hand immediately, and I was, like, ‘It’s bulls**t. This conference sucks. You didn’t let us talk. This was supposed to be about the students.’

“And he did not like it. I remember his face got really red. He used to get really fiery when he [made] speeches. It was crazy.”

Plaza, who starred in more than 120 episodes of Parks and Recreation, also spoke about how the pair reconnected when the political comedy featured a cameo from Biden during its fifth season, when he was Barack Obama’s vice-president.

“I saw him, and he knew my name,” she said.

“He always tells me the same story. His first wife went to the same high school that I went to, so he tells me about how he used to wait outside the convent for her.”

• Dec 01 2023

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