On what would have been Jeff Baena’s 48th birthday, Debby Ryan posted a rare, unguarded tribute that cut through the usual gloss of celebrity Instagram. Six months after Baena’s death by suicide in January, the former Disney star—who worked with him on the films Horse Girl and Spin Me Round—shared memories and admitted she’s been thinking about him every day. It wasn’t polished or performative. It was a working actor grieving a friend, collaborator, and mentor in public because hiding it no longer felt honest.
A private person breaks the silence
Ryan, who led nearly 100 episodes of Disney’s Jessie from 2011 to 2015, opened her June 29 post with a caveat: “Bear with me,” she wrote. “I’ve never been a public griever, and have a hard time sharing fragile feelings with strangers.” That line told you most of what you needed to know. She didn’t post because she’s comfortable with an audience watching her hurt. She posted because milestones—like a birthday—pull loss into the present tense.
“At the beginning of the year, I lost a dear friend, cherished collaborator and mentor in Jeff Baena,” she added. The caption didn’t tidy up grief with platitudes. Instead, she called the stretch since January “very hard and heavy,” a simple phrase that mirrors how loss often shows up: not as a single dramatic breakdown, but as a daily weight you carry while trying to work, show up for people, and move forward without moving on.
Ryan and Baena knew each other as colleagues first. She took a supporting role in his 2020 film Horse Girl, a genre-blending story co-written by Baena and star Alison Brie. Two years later, Ryan joined the ensemble of Spin Me Round, Baena’s off-kilter comedy set against a corporate retreat in Italy, again collaborating with Brie and Baena’s wife, Aubrey Plaza. On Baena’s sets, actors often talked about room to play and explore—he favored character-driven scenes and ensembles that clicked. Ryan stepped into that world and stayed, the relationship shifting from job to mentorship and friendship.
The tributes Ryan posted—moments from sets, snapshots with friends, glimpses of the work—functioned like a private album made briefly public. The comments were nearly unanimous in tone. Colleagues and fans logged on to remind her she isn’t carrying this alone. One remark, which Ryan highlighted, read: “I know you’ll perpetuate his values, energy and ideas. He saw something in you, so keep showing the world what he saw.” That’s the language of mentorship: someone reflects your potential back to you so clearly that you begin to see it yourself.
Public grieving is tricky for anyone who’s recognized in a grocery store. Share too little, people fill in the silence with guesses. Share too much, the audience can mistake vulnerability for spectacle. Ryan’s post threaded a careful line. It didn’t reveal the private details of a relationship that wasn’t ours to know. It simply honored a person who shaped her work and life, and it did so in words that other mourners—famous or not—could recognize.
Remembering Jeff Baena
Jeff Baena had become a fixture of American indie film over the last decade. He first broke through as a co-writer on I Heart Huckabees (2004), then moved into directing with Life After Beth (2014), a dark comedy starring Aubrey Plaza that premiered at Sundance. He followed with Joshy (2016), the medieval farce The Little Hours (2017), Horse Girl (2020), and Spin Me Round (2022). If you’ve seen a Baena film, you know the mix: mordant humor, ensembles packed with sharp improvisers, and an off-kilter tone that lets sincerity sneak up on you.
Festivals took notice. Life After Beth and The Little Hours both bowed at Sundance; Horse Girl premiered there as well; Spin Me Round went to SXSW. In each, Baena built worlds where oddness wasn’t a gag—it was a lens. He used it to get at loneliness, denial, desire, and the way people misread one another, sometimes hilariously, sometimes painfully. That approach attracted a recurring circle of collaborators, among them Plaza and Brie, who trusted the space he made for actors on set.
Baena and Plaza, who revealed they were married in 2021, worked side by side for years. Their projects weren’t extravagant; they were carefully scaled stories that lived or died on tone and chemistry. That kind of filmmaking needs trust. It also needs people who come back, which is why you’d see familiar faces weaving through Baena’s casts—Zach Woods, Molly Shannon, John C. Reilly, Dave Franco, Fred Armisen, Alison Brie, and, in that later stretch, Ryan herself.
For Ryan, the professional connection became personal. The way she described Baena—mentor, collaborator, friend—tracks with how others in the indie world have talked about him: someone who encouraged you to try the riskier idea, someone who cared about the ensemble more than the punchline. Grief lands hard when the person you lost helped you see the work you were capable of doing.
It’s notable that Ryan chose a birthday to post. Anniversary grief has its own rhythm. Dates drag you back into rooms you left months ago. For artists, those reminders can surface in the work, too—on sets, during rehearsal, when you hear a note or see a prop that unlocks an old conversation. Ryan didn’t detail those moments, but she didn’t need to. “I think about him every day,” she wrote, and people who’ve navigated fresh loss knew exactly what that means.
Social media can flatten nuance, but it can also serve as a communal memorial. Over the last decade, platforms have become living archives of tributes, eulogies, and quick notes that would have been private texts just a few years ago. Posts like Ryan’s do more than gather likes; they create a visible ledger of a person’s influence—proof that the energy they put into a community keeps circulating long after the credits roll.
Baena’s legacy is measurable in the films he made, but also in the actors and crews he shaped. Ryan’s post suggests she’ll carry that forward—by choosing projects that value risk and ensemble, by mentoring the way she was mentored, by making room for honesty in a profession that often rewards gloss. That’s not a grand statement. It’s a set of small decisions, the kind that add up.
If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, help is available. In the United States, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. In the U.K. and Ireland, Samaritans are available at 116 123. In Australia, Lifeline is 13 11 14. If you’re elsewhere, check with local health services for support in your area.
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