Aubrey Plaza addresses sudden death of husband Jeff Baena: 'This is an unimaginable tragedy'

Aubrey Plaza has addressed the shocking sudden death of her husband and longtime creative partner Jeff Baena.

In a statement shared with Entertainment Weekly, Plaza said of Baena's death, "This is an unimaginable tragedy. We are deeply grateful to everyone who has offered support. Please respect our privacy during this time."

Baena's death was confirmed to EW by a representative for the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office on Saturday, and was ruled a suicide by hanging according to medical examiner records viewed by EW.

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Plaza was slated to present at last night's Golden Globes, but was ultimately not in attendance.

During his acceptance speech for Best Director - Motion Picture, The Brutalist's Brady Corbet stated, "My heart is with Aubrey Plaza and the family of Jeff Baena."

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Numerous other friends and former collaborators of Baena's have shared their memories of the filmmaker and expressed their shock and dismay over his sudden passing.

In a now-expired series of Instagram Stories, Baena's frequent collaborator Alison Brie shared several photos with the filmmaker. "Rest in peace my friend," she wrote over images from the sets of projects like Horse Girl, Spin Me Round, and The Little Hours, all of which Baena wrote and directed, and in which Brie featured.

Molly Shannon, who starred in Baena's unconventional romcom Spin Me Round, shared a photo with the director on her Instagram with a simple broken heart emoji as a caption. Adam Pally, the star of Baena's 2016 Joshy, posted a lengthy tribute to his own Instagram, which read in part, "Jeff Baena was a sweet, Jewish boy from Miami... He was a talented director with impeccable taste and vision, he was a connector of people, a fosterer of possibility, the guy who knows where the best restaurant was no matter where you were. An overly gracious host with an almost disturbing open door policy, a film encyclopedia, and most important to me a friend."

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Plaza and Baena began dating in 2011 and married in 2021. Plaza was a fixture of Baena's films, including Life After Beth, The Little Hours, and Spin Me Round. The actress recently made her directorial debut as part of Baena's public domain anthology Cinema Toast, which premiered on Showtime in 2021.

"It was great," Plaza told PEOPLE the same year, remarking that it was "very hectic while we were making the show because we were quarantined... our house became this strange post-production facility and he's downstairs on his Zooms or on his sessions and I'm upstairs editing, we're just going back and forth,"

Plaza described the collaboration as "very us. We were not baking sourdough bread, but we were sifting through hours of old movies and footage and re-cutting them together and just letting our minds go on a trip. So it was great."

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly