Aubrey Plaza opened up about the shock of suffering a stroke at 20 years old — and still having no clue what caused it.
“It’s honestly a mystery,” Plaza, 41, said on the Monday, April 20, episode of the “SmartLess” podcast. “I think it was birth control or the tricycline.”
The actress recalled trying to figure out the cause of her health scare, adding, “That was the only thing I was putting in my body. Like, I wasn’t on drugs or doing anything weird. So it was a real fluke.”
She continued: “Even to this day, whenever I go to the doctor, I have to fill out my history. I’ve seen top neurologists and I’ve been tested for all the blood disorders and clotting disorders and everything. I really think it must have been birth control.”
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Plaza — who is currently pregnant and expecting her first baby with Chris Abbott — has spoken over the years about the terrifying side effects of her stroke. Plaza noted on Monday that her friends didn’t realize what was going on at first.
“I was not fine because I wasn’t talking. So my friends thought I was doing a bit. They were like, ‘Stop it,’” she shared on Monday. “Then they realized that something was wrong. So the paramedics came.”
Plaza clarified that she was “aware” something was wrong despite not being able to communicate.
“It’s a really weird thing when you have a stroke. I’ve read books about it. It’s across the board a really similar experience that people have,” she explained. “You know what’s happening. It really makes you understand that there’s your brain and then there’s something else going on, which is very profound to think about because whatever that other thing is is watching my brain malfunction.”
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Plaza said she had a feeling that her “brain wasn’t working right,” adding, “It’s this really f***ked up thing where you’re like, ‘Wait a minute, my consciousness is operating on another level.’ So people would talk to me and I would know how to respond to them. I would know the answer, but I could not get it through the pathways of my brain out of my mouth.”
In 2024, Plaza explained that she “forgot how to talk” after the medical episode.
“It just happened. That’s when I was paralyzed, but only really for a minute or something. I lost my motor skills really briefly,” she said on The Howard Stern Show. “It happened mid-sentence.”
Years prior, Plaza noted that even paramedics were confused. “They were thinking that I was dehydrated,” she said on NPR’s Fresh Air in 2017. “And I really think they thought I was on drugs because they kept asking me if I’d taken drugs, and I hadn’t. … [Afterward], I had some cognitive, you know, therapy that I went to. I went back to school in the fall.”
