The first thing Aubrey Plaza says when she pulls up in the parking lot of the Vermont Canyon tennis courts is “I don’t really know how to play tennis. Do you?” The first thing I do in response is to laugh in her face, because this must be a joke. It’s a hot, nosebleed-dry Los Angeles day; there’s no cloud cover or trees to protect us from the sun, and the asphalt courts are heating up like a kiln. The only acceptable place for a human is somewhere air-conditioned, but one of us had proposed a rousing game of tennis and — hint, hint — it wasn’t me. When Plaza — queen of the deadpan delivery, patron saint of the sharp-tongued — claims she doesn’t know how to play tennis after suggesting we play tennis, my instant and totally unfair response is to assume she’s setting me up and will soon be mocking me for sweating profusely, like she’s a real-life April Ludgate.

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In person, Plaza is less deadpan, less caustic, less sarcastic, maybe even goofier, than the onscreen persona that made her famous. Still, she tells me, she’s well aware that I expected her to be a total jerk during tennis. It happens to her all the time, even now, at 33, almost a decade after she first played April.

“When I meet people for the first time, they can’t believe I’m not going to be mean,” she says. “They’ll do a thing where they’ll be kind of mean to me, and I can tell they think that that’s what I’m like.” Such are the hazards of finding fame as a misanthropic adolescent. “It’s like I’m too much of a people pleaser to not do it,” she says. “Sometimes it’s fun for me, because if I say something sarcastic or whatever, they’ll eat it up; they aren’t offended. I’m like, I know what you want. You want me to fucking say something weird to you. Fine.”