Director Jeff Baena, husband to actress Aubrey Plaza, dies at 47

Actress Aubrey Plaza (left) and her director husband Jeff Baena (right). Baena died of suicide on Jan 3 at age 47. PHOTO: PLAZADEAUBREY/INSTAGRAM

Emmett Lindner

UPDATED Jan 06, 2025, 04:21 PM

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LOS ANGELES – American director and screenwriter Jeff Baena, who co-wrote the dark comedy I Heart Huckabees (2004) and who directed films including Life After Beth (2014) and Horse Girl (2020), died on Jan 3 at a residence in Los Angeles. He was 47.

The Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office said Baena, who was married to American actress Aubrey Plaza, had died by suicide.

Plaza, 40, and Baena began dating in 2011 and got married in 2021, on their 1 0th anniversary of being together. They do not have children.

Plaza, who was originally scheduled to be a presenter at the Golden Globes awards ceremony on Jan 5, skipped the show following the tragedy.

Baena often elevated dark thematic elements with humour in his works. There were zombies and romance in Life After Beth and improper nuns in the mediaeval black comedy The Little Hours (2017).

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

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Baena also co-wrote I Heart Huckabees, a dark comedy that stars Dustin Hoffman, Jude Law, Jason Schwartzman, Lily Tomlin and Mark Wahlberg. The film, about an environmentalist who hires “existential detectives”, was not a box-office success, but developed a cult following for its quirky plot lines and characters.

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

He decided to become a film-maker at 11 years old, he told Fresh Fiction, when he was flipping through cable television channels and tuned into 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 rental store, where they rented the 1963 Federico Fellini film 8½ .

“I was always drawn to weirdo movies,” he said on Fresh Fiction. He said he was exposed “to a lot of stuff that I think was a little bit left of centre, and so that was normalised for me.” He added: “I sought it out.”

Jeffrey Baena was born on June 29, 1977, and grew up in Miami. He graduated from New York University in 1999, where he majored in film and minored in mediaeval and renaissance studies, according to The New Yorker.

He co-wrote I Heart Huckabees with director David O. Russell. The film “captures liberal-left despair with astonishingly good humour”, critic Manohla Dargis wrote in her review of the movie for The New York Times.

Actress Aubrey Plaza (left) and her director husband Jeff Baena (right). Baena died on Jan 3 at age 47. PHOTO: PLAZADEAUBREY/INSTAGRAM

Dargis added that it is a “comedy of dialectics, in which opposing dualities slug it out like wounded lovers, but it’s nothing if not deeply sincere”.

Plaza became well known for her role as April Ludgate on the sitcom series Parks And Recreation (2009 to 2015), in which she played a moody, sardonic and reluctant office worker. She has recently starred in films including Megalopolis (2024) and TV series like 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; a brother, Brad Baena, and stepsister Bianca Gabay and stepbrother Jed Fluxman. NYTIMES

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