This interview contains spoilers for Legion Season 3, episode 5, which aired on July 22. Legion Season 3 airs Mondays at 10 p.m. on FX in the US.
Aubrey Plaza is as obsessed with her Legion character as you are. Over the wild series’ fantastical run — “And yes,” she admits, “it’s just as confusing to me” — her performance has been a breakout among breakouts, a singular talent in a Noah Hawley show chockablock with them. But Plaza knows, like the rest of us, that she has a leg up on everyone else in the show: she’s freakin’ Lenny, and Lenny is nothing if not pure chaos. She’s technically already dead, and has died a bunch of times, was taken over by a supermutant (Navid Negaban), and has David Haller (Dan Stevens)’s adoptive sister living in her head, seeing with her eyes. With this character more than most, truly, anything is possible. “That is why Lenny is such a fun character, because she’s a lovable villain. She’s a lovable trickster!”
Of course. if you’ve watched episode five of the Marvel TV adaptation of the comic of the same name, you already know the truth: Lenny might actually be done for good this time, fully dead. After having had enough of David’s cruelty laced attempts for redemption, and finding a bit of her own life and happiness outside of that, she removes herself completely from the equation, slicing her own neck.
Plaza confirmed these scenes being her final moments on a call with journalists who visited set ahead of the season premiere, calling episode five her final bow. “At the end of Lenny’s arc, I would say that you do get to see, I think, the closest thing to real Lenny that we’ve seen so far.” She also added that this is, “the closest we get to Lenny’s ideal, aspirational self. We find her in a place where she’s more at peace than she has been. [But] she still has half of Amy Haller’s DNA, so she’ll never be the same [person] she was two lives ago, but this is the closest we get to her true, true self.”
Whether it is a wish of her own making or borne out of Amy’s (Katie Aselton) DNA, Plaza believes that Lenny, “ultimately wants to be happy, to be normal. She found someone she loves and she wants to settle down—whatever that means for her. But of course, that ultimately gets completely thrown out the window.”
Plaza doesn’t have any regrets about Lenny’s seemingly permanent demise, because her final death wasn’t at the hands of anyone else.
“[David has] been her entire reason for being for so long. And I think that what she does at the end is an attempt to take control back; take her power back. I think it would have been very dissatisfying and depressing to me, if she had just been killed by The Shadow King, or by David, or by anyone,” she explained, before pointedly adding, “She’s already died multiple times. She’s been tortured. She’s been fighting to survive. And I think that it’s her attempt at taking control, and saying, ‘If I’m gonna die again, then I’m gonna die like this. And I’m going to do it on my own terms.’ She’d had enough.”
This wasn’t, however, the ending for her character that she’d envisioned. “I had no idea it was gonna end like this. I had no idea it was gonna end when it did, or how it did. It was all very surprising to me.”
Aubrey Plaza as Lenny in Legion.
But also, who are we kidding? Journalists were only supplied with the first six episodes, and, well: this is Legion. Anything is possible, and now David has a time traveler — Switch, played by Lauren Tsai — keen on helping him turn the world back and rewind his crimes. (Or whatever reasoning he’s telling himself to justify his actions).
Of course, even if this is the end, it went out with a bang for Lenny—and for Plaza, too. We are, of course, talking about the Alice in Wonderland Tea Party scene, complete with Lenny as a resplendently maniacal Mad Hatter. The actress was delighted by the experience. “I got to kind of live out my Tim Burton fantasy,” she enthused.
It is in these moments of talking about Lenny that you really understand the level of affection Plaza has for the character. “It was just amazing. And I think that’s the fun [of it]; to just be able to kind of fully trip out, wearing a top hat, crawling around on a table. I had a blast doing that. It just felt like this was her dream, just as it was my own, actual dream.”
And oh, what a trippy dream it has been to watch.
For more on Legion, check out how Noah Hawley and Harry Lloyd created a new version of Professor X.