Aubrey Plaza recalls the time she was briefly paralysed after an unexplained stroke 20 years ago

Aubrey Plaza has opened up about the time she was briefly paralysed by a stroke at 20 years old.

The White Lotus actress, 40, appeared on Sirius XM's Howard Stern Show, where she detailed what exactly happened all those years ago.

"It was wild," she told Stern. "It happened mid-sentence."

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Plaza explained it all happened while she was attending college at New York University.

She had been on the subway on her way to a friend's apartment, but when she walked in the door she found herself unable to move.

"I took the train to Astoria to have lunch with my friends and I walked into their apartment – I hadn't even taken my jacket off – and it just happened," Plaza shared.

She added that she was "paralysed" but only for a short amount of time, recalling it to be around a minute.

"I lost my motor skills really briefly," The Parks and Recreation alum shared.

"The freakiest thing was I forgot how to talk."

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It turns out that Plaza suffered a stroke, telling NPR in 2017 her friends had initially thought she was joking because "I was always doing something stupid," but they quickly realised something was seriously wrong.

Because she was so young, the paramedics didn't assume that it was a stroke, instead asking her if she had taken any drugs.

"I hadn't really put anything into my body that day and - except for birth control, which ended up being maybe the cause of the stroke," Plaza shared.

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Plaza spent several days in the the hospital, after the doctors realised she had had a stroke when, not only was she still unable to speak, but she was unable to put her right hand on her left knee.

"I had expressive aphasia, where I could understand what's happening, but I couldn't talk or communicate," she told The Guardian in 2016.

"Like, you could say something and I would know what you meant but I couldn't express it or even write it.

"But at least I could walk. When it first happened to me I was paralysed, but I was so young that my brain healed itself really fast. I was really lucky in that way."

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