Aubrey Plaza comes clean about Legion and her Neanderthal heritage on Late Night

On Thursday’s Late Night With Seth Meyers, Legion star Aubrey Plaza had a very April Ludgate-esque answer to host Meyers’ request for a rundown of just what the hell is going on on the show that our reviewer calls “weird and wondrous.” Others might claim to be baffled and lost in this trippiest outpost of the Marvel cinematic/television superhero universe, but, hey, that’s what Guardians Of The Galaxy is for.

Anyway, Plaza confided to Meyers that she had texted Legion creator Noah Hawley before her Late Night appearance to try to get him to feed her some talking points, and, if his advice to call it “Home Ec class on acid” wasn’t super helpful, Plaza managed to lay out her character’s elaborately bananas backstory well enough. Her story about Hawley’s character-specific music playlists was also only vaguely helpful, consisting as hers did of a combination of Pink Floyd and “unpleasant ambient” sound collages reminiscent of “people screaming into trash cans.” (A clip of a moody interpretive dance number between her Lenny and Jemaine Clement’s Oliver was also less than illuminating, if plenty striking.)

Wearing a high-fashion slinky dress, Plaza nonetheless was her signature twinkly deadpan self through the interview, riffing with Meyers about her recent, Oprah-recommended DNA test. Finding the usual multicultural grab bag in her results (Plaza “rounded up” her unexpected .6 percent Ashkenazi heritage to a solid 1 percent Jewish), she seemed especially pleased by the Neanderthal markers in her makeup. Telling Meyers that basically manifests as a lack of back hair in her case, Plaza seemed delighted to be as genetically whimsical as her persona would suggest. It’s not a Legion-style mutant power, but it’ll do.