I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS FOR SO LONG OMG

The biggest result so far has been Parks and Recreation. Didn’t co-creator Greg Daniels write the part of April Ludgate for you? 
Yeah. I came out to L.A. to have a couple meetings, and one was with Greg Daniels and [Parks co-creator] Mike Schur. They hadn’t written the script, they just had a general idea of what it was. So I met them way early in the process. The only people attached to the show were Amy, Rashida [Jones], and Aziz [Ansari], but they didn’t even know their characters yet. I didn’t realize how important that meeting was. [Laughs.] I was like, “Hey, I’ve never been to L.A., so whatever.” I showed up in jean shorts and was just a weirdo.

Clearly, it worked out for you. 
We started talking casually, and I threw out a couple of ideas. “Wouldn’t it be funny if they had a college intern who didn’t really want to be there and was only there for the college credit?” And they said, “That’d be really funny.” I found out later that they wrote me into the pilot, and they even used my name. But then I had to audition for it. I just went in and read on tape, but they changed the character’s name from Aubrey to April so I wouldn’t think that it was written for me. [Laughs.] I pretty much had it in the bag, but I didn’t know it.