Director Jeff Baena, husband of actress Aubrey Plaza, dies at the age of 47

LOS ANGELES – On January 3, American director and screenwriter Jeff Baena, co-writer of the black comedy I Heart Huckabees (2004) and director of such films as Life After Beth (2014) and Horse Girl (2020), died at his residence in Los Angeles. Angeles. He was 47 years old.

The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office said Baena, who was married to American actress Aubrey Plaza, died by suicide. Plaza, 40, and Baena started dating in 2011 and married in 2021 on their 1st birthday.0 anniversary of being together. They have no children.

Plaza, who was originally scheduled to present at the Golden Globe Awards on January 5, left the show following the tragedy.

Baena often elevated elements of dark subject matter through humor in his works. There were zombies and romance in Life After Beth and the wrong nuns in the medieval dark comedy The Little Hours (2017).

Plaza played the title character in Life After Beth, about a woman who comes back from the dead after a fatal snake bite, and also starred in The Little Hours and Spin Me Round (2022), which Baena directed and co-wrote with actress Alison Brie.

Baena also co-wrote the script for I Heart Huckabees, dark comedy starring Dustin Hoffman, Jude Law, Jason Schwartzman, Lily Tomlin and Mark Wahlberg. The film, about an environmentalist who employs “existential detectives,” was not a box office success, but gained a cult following thanks to its quirky plot and characters.

“My parents were divorced, so I’m sure the trauma of the divorce influenced my sense of humor,” Baena said in an interview with YouTube channel Fresh Fiction in 2022. “Most comedy probably comes from drama.”

He decided to become a filmmaker at age 11, he told Fresh Fiction, while surfing through cable channels and turned on Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1972). He was so intrigued by the film that he asked his father to take him to a video store that rented Federico Fellini’s 1963 film 8½.

“I’ve always been drawn to weirdo movies,” he said on Fresh Fiction. He said he was exposed to “a lot of things that I thought were a little bit off center, so it was normal for me.” He added: “I was looking for this.”

Jeffrey Baena was born on June 29, 1977 and grew up in Miami. According to The New Yorker, in 1999 he graduated from New York University, where he majored in film and minored in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

He co-wrote I Heart Huckabees with director David O. Russell. The film “captures the despair of left-wing liberals with surprisingly good humor,” wrote critic Manohla Dargis in her 2004 review of the film for The New York Times.

Dargis added that it is “a comedy of dialectics, where opposing dualities face each other like wounded lovers, but it is incredibly honest.”

His wife, Plaza, became famous for her role as April Ludgate on the comedy series Parks And Recreation (2009–2015), in which she played a moody, sardonic and reluctant office worker. She recently starred in films such as Megalopolis (2024) and television series such as Agatha All Along (2024).

In addition to Plaza, Baena’s survivors include his mother, Barbara Stern, and stepfather, Roger Stern; his father Scott Baena and stepmother Michele Baena; brother Brad Baena and half-sister Bianca Gabay and half-brother Jed Fluxman. MODERN

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