Aubrey Plaza (Ingrid Goes West) is set to star in Hulu’s new series Olga Dies Dreaming. Plaza will play the titular Olga in the one-hour drama pilot based on the novel by Xochitl Gonzalez. The project was picked up by the Disney-owned streamer earlier this year.
Written by Gonzalez, the project is set to be directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl). Olga Dies Dreaming is the story of a Nuyorican brother and sister from a gentrifying Sunset Park in Brooklyn who are reckoning with their absent, politically radical mother and their glittering careers among New York City’s elite in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
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Olga Acevedo is a renowned wedding planner whose surface successes mask a darker interior. For Olga, the pursuit of perfection has become a compulsive survival mechanism as she tries to climb as far from her past as she can. Still, she can’t shake the feeling that the important people she knows don’t see her as their equals, and this nagging sense that her success is an illusion always leaves her wanting more.
A relative newcomer to the industry, Gonzalez previously worked as an entrepreneur and consultant. After deciding that she wanted to pursue a career in writing, however, she enrolled in the University of Iowa and received her MFA and became both an Iowa Arts Fellow and the recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Prize in Fiction. Since graduating, she’s been published in Vogue and The Cut just to name a few outlets.
Variety was the first to report on Plaza’s involvement.