Aubrey Plaza is reportedly expecting with her first child, just over a year after the death of her estranged husband, filmmaker Jeff Baena.
The White Lotus star, 41, is understood to be having the baby with her partner, Christopher Abbott, 40, with the child due in the autumn.
A source told People: “It was a beautiful surprise after an emotional year.”
Plaza and Abbott, who have collaborated both on screen and stage, are said to feel “very blessed”. The Standard has contacted Aubrey Plaza and Christopher Abbott’s rep for comment.
The pair first worked together on the 2019 psychological drama Black Bear, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2020 to strong critical acclaim.
They reunited in 2023 for an Off-Broadway revival of John Patrick Shanley’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, which ran into January 2024, further cementing their creative partnership.
The couple were last publicly seen together on February 14, attending Khaite’s Autumn/Winter 2026 show during New York Fashion Week, where they sat front row alongside Elizabeth Debicki and Gemma Chan.
Prior to the pregnancy news, Plaza had kept her relationship with Abbott largely out of the spotlight.
Reports of the relationship first began to circulate in mid-2025, when the pair were reportedly seen together at Chatham Berry Farm in upstate New York.
According to social media outlet DeuxMoi, Plaza was spotted speaking with a woman later identified as Abbott’s sister, Christina Abbott, who subsequently shared a post from the same location.
Abbott has built a reputation as one of the more quietly consistent actors of his generation, moving between independent film and larger studio projects.
The actor is perhaps best known for his role in Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls, where he played the on-off boyfriend of Allison Williams’s character, Marnie.
He has also starred in A Most Violent Year, James White, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot and the psychological horror It Comes at Night as well as opposite Ryan Gosling in Damien Chazelle’s First Man.
Most recently, he appeared alongside Amanda Seyfried in The Testament of Ann Lee, and is set to feature in Netflix’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, opposite Florence Pugh.
The news of Plaza’s pregnancy comes over a year after the death of her husband, the screenwriter and director Jeff Baena, who died by suicide aged 47.
Baena and Plaza started dating in 2011 and married a decade later.
The Parks and Rec star actor spoke publicly about his death for the first time in August during an appearance on Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast, where she reflected on the months that followed.
She compared her grief to “a giant ocean of awfulness”, drawing an analogy with the 2025 film The Gorge.
“This is a really dumb analogy – it was a joke at a certain point but I kind of mean it – have you seen the film The Gorge? It’s like an alien movie with Miles Teller,” she said.
“In the movie, there’s a cliff on one side and a cliff on the other side and a gorge in between, which is filled with other people who are trying to get there. That’s what my grief is like.”
