Aubrey Plaza Recalls Being ‘Briefly’ Paralyzed During Unexplained Stroke at Age 20: ‘I Forgot How to Talk’

Aubrey Plaza is sharing more details of a sudden unexplained stroke she suffered at age 20.

The Parks and Rec alum, now 40, appeared on Sirius XM’s Howard Stern Show on Sept. 11, where she opened up about her health episode, recalling that she lost her ability to speak. “It was wild,” she said.

“It happened mid-sentence,” Plaza told Stern, according to Delaware Online. 

Plaza, who left her native Delaware to attend New York University, shared that she’d been on the subway headed to a friend’s apartment when the unexplained medical episode happened.

“I took the train to Astoria to have lunch with my friends and I walked into their apartment ― I hadn’t even taken my jacket off ― and it just happened,” she told Stern.

The White Lotus star told Stern “I was paralyzed, but only really for a minute or something. I lost my motor skills really briefly. The freakiest thing was I forgot how to talk.”

It wasn’t the first time she had mentioned her stroke. In a 2017 interview with NPR’s Fresh Air, she shared that friends had called paramedics, who at first “thought I was on drugs because they kept asking me if I’d taken drugs, and I hadn’t. I hadn’t really put anything into my body that day except for birth control.”

Once she was in the hospital, Plaza says her episode was determined to be a stroke when a doctor “asked me to put my right hand on my left knee. And I couldn’t do it. I was confused about right and left. And I think that’s when everyone realized, oh, like, she had a stroke.”

There are two types of stroke — ischemic and hemorrhagic — the Mayo Clinic explains. Ischemic is when the blood supply to part of the brain is blocked or reduced, while hemorrhagic, as the name implies, involves bleeding in the brain.

As Plaza told NPR, “Since then, I’ve had some minor – they call them TIAs, which are transient ischemic attacks, that are tiny little strokes.”

These days, she’s recovering from a different injury, as the publication noted that she was late to the interview as she’s still nursing a torn ACL — an injury she sustained while playing basketball during the NBA All-Star Weekend.

Plaza was on Stern’s show to promote her upcoming Francis Ford Coppola film Megalopolis, admitting she was “surprised I got that audition.”

“I thought, ‘How am I on his radar?’ “ according to Delaware Online. “And then I never thought I would actually get that part. I was like, ‘Well, I’ll do the meeting, of course,’ but I didn’t think I was going to get the part and I was actually shocked when I got it.”