Aubrey Plaza is expecting her first child. The White Lotus and Parks and Recreation actress, 41, is pregnant with her first baby with partner Christopher Abbott, 40, with sources confirming the news to People on Tuesday. The baby is due in the northern hemisphere autumn, and the gender has not been revealed.
“It was a beautiful surprise after an emotional year,” a source told People. The couple are said to be feeling deeply grateful for the news.
How they found each other
Plaza and Abbott’s relationship grew out of a professional one that spans several years. The two first worked together on the 2019 indie psychological drama Black Bear, a critically acclaimed low-budget thriller that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2020 and is widely regarded as one of Plaza’s strongest screen performances. They later shared the stage in 2023 in an Off-Broadway revival of John Patrick Shanley’s play Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, which ran into early 2024.
The romance remained largely private. The pair were spotted together at a farm in rural New York in June 2025, and made their most visible public appearance in February of this year when they attended New York Fashion Week’s Khaite show together, seated side by side in the front row.
The year that came before
The pregnancy news arrives more than a year after one of the most difficult periods of Plaza’s life. Her husband, filmmaker Jeff Baena, died by suicide on 3 January 2025. The couple had been together since 2011 and had quietly married in 2020, though it later emerged they had separated in September 2024, four months before his death.
Baena, best known for writing the 2004 comedy I Heart Huckabees and directing the 2014 film Life After Beth — which starred Plaza — was found at their former marital home by a dog walker. Plaza had been living in New York at the time.
In the months that followed, Plaza spoke about her grief carefully and sparingly. Her first public appearance after Baena’s death was at the SNL 50th anniversary special in February 2025, where she paid a quiet tribute to him by wearing a tie-dye shirt — a nod to the matching tie-dye pyjamas they had worn at their wedding. In a podcast conversation with former co-star Amy Poehler last August, she described grief as something permanently present, like an ocean of awfulness always within view — sometimes approached, sometimes avoided, but never truly gone.
Who is Christopher Abbott
Abbott is a critically respected actor whose career has moved steadily between independent film and larger productions. He is perhaps best known to television audiences for his role in the HBO series Girls, but his film credits include First Man alongside Ryan Gosling, Poor Things with Emma Stone, and the 2017 psychological horror film It Comes at Night. He is set to appear in an upcoming Netflix adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, co-starring Florence Pugh.
For Plaza, whose own career has spanned Parks and Recreation, The White Lotus, Legion and a string of acclaimed independent films, the news represents a forward step in a year she has described as one of daily navigation. Those close to the couple say they are feeling very blessed.
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