Aubrey Plaza expected her self-pleasuring scene in The To Do List to keep the action offscreen. She arrived to find a camera mounted on the ceiling for a full-body shot.
The script gave her 2 words to work with: “Brandy masturbates.” Preparing to film The To Do List, she imagined her hand disappearing beyond the camera’s view, leaving the rest to the audience’s imagination.
Instead, she recalled arriving in her underwear and a Clinton T-shirt to find an overhead camera set up to capture her whole body. Writer-director Maggie Carey said the shirt read “pro-choice, pro-Clinton” and was one she’d worn in high school.
Recounting the shoot on Conan on July 23, 2013, Plaza said she asked Carey what she should do. Carey’s answer, as Plaza recalled it: “masturbate like it says in the script.”
“I thought I was doing one thing. And then when I showed up, it was a whole different thing,” Plaza said. She later described the scene as the most nerve-wracking part of filming and said she could still hear her own breathing from it.
Plaza also clarified that she’d exaggerated her description of old men smoking in the room: they were crew members, and they weren’t smoking. The scene was filmed before intimacy coordinators became standard on sets. The Conan interview resurfaced widely in 2023 amid broader discussions of on-set intimacy.
Carey also discussed filming the scene that July. In her account, Plaza suggested using a pillow and asked, “Is that too much?”
Carey recalled replying, “Nothing is too much in this movie.” She described the difference between putting the scene on the page and shooting it with a crew in the room. Carey later called Plaza “genius” and “game for anything,” praising her willingness to be vulnerable and put herself in awkward positions.
The 2013 comedy follows Brandy Klark, a Boise, Idaho, high school valedictorian seeking sexual experience before college. Her curiosity unfolds in 1993, before the internet became an easy place to look for answers. Carey drew Brandy loosely from her own life: she graduated from high school in Boise in 1993, worked as a lifeguard and described herself as a Type-A overachiever, though she said she never had an actual list.
Carey made her feature-directing debut with the film. Its script, originally titled The Hand Job, reached the Black List, and her then-husband Bill Hader appeared in the cast. Critics often praised Plaza and the young woman’s point of view, though some found the comedy safer than its premise suggested.
The finished film has no nudity. Carey said its sex scenes were “played for comedy.”