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After its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January, Megan Park’s sophomore directorial feature My Old Ass arrived in theaters with the last of the summer sun in a September 13 limited release. The coming-of-age comedy film is equal parts hilarious and heartfelt, tackling the young-adult approach to growing up and the idea of revisiting those moments years later with 20/20 vision.
Maisy Stella (Nashville) stars as the younger version of Elliott, a queer teen who summons the 39-year-old version of herself on her 18th birthday after taking magic mushrooms with her two closest friends. What follows is a wiser Elliott navigating events ahead of her, knowing that they hold a lot of weight for her future self.
“Maisy and I I keep joking, ‘But I should just say it’s my autobiography because nobody would know that this actually happened to me,’ but no mushrooms are involved,” Park said of the film’s conception Saturday at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles event, joining virtually from her home in Toronto. “I was home in Canada. I just had my first daughter, and I was feeling really nostalgic sleeping in my childhood bedroom, and started thinking about, ‘Wow, there was a night where my family, my nuclear family, slept under the same roof together for the last time.’ They didn’t realize it was the last time before my sister moved away and I moved out, and it just made me really sad. And I started thinking, ‘If I could go back and appreciate it, could it make it better, or whatever in the moment?’ Would you want to know that it was the last time you were going to experience something or not?’”
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Plaza’s Elliott inadvertently drops some information regarding events that Stella’s Elliott hasn’t yet experienced, and she has one heavy point of advice that challenges the younger Elliott within her final days at home in Muskoka, Canada, before she starts college at the University of Toronto. Park and Stella both spoke to the process of Plaza’s casting after Stella had already been selected as the younger Elliott.
“We were given the ability to cast younger Elliott first and take an amazing chance, which obviously worked out, on somebody who hadn’t been in a movie before, and then build the entire film around Maisy,” Park said. “We struggled a bit with older Elliott because we were so caught on who looks the most like Maisy and the physical aspect, really. And then at some point, we took a step back, and [said], ‘Wait a second, this is a buy-in. The whole idea is a buy-in.’ Maisy was so phenomenal and had such an incredible energy. It was more about who’s going to match that? Who do we want to see on that log? Who cares about the age? Who cares about what they look like? And Aubrey’s name was on list, and we just never considered her, because originally the character was in their late 40s, and she doesn’t look anything like Maisy, but we thought, ‘You know who we want to see, I want to see on that log is Aubrey.’ There was such an intangible chemistry and similarity between their senses of humor that was so specific that as soon as we thought about the entire movie with the two of them, everything clicked.”
Just as Park and Stella met Plaza out on a jetty to take her to set via paddleboat, Stella spoke to the ability to meet Plaza halfway for the character of Elliott.
“It was not typical, because I was filming for like two weeks when Aubrey was attached. In any normal situation, obviously, I would be completely matching Aubrey where she was standing, but because my younger Elliott was already established we met much more in the middle than we would have if it was any other situation,” Stella said. “We had very little time together in real life before we started filming, and both of us had a very similar energy and approach to it, where we did not put too much pressure on it being that we’re the same person. We tried to connect in a real way.”
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My Old Ass is now streaming on Prime Video. Check back Monday for the panel video.
The presenting sponsor for this year’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles is United for Business. Sponsors are Eyeptizer Eyewear, Final Draft + ScreenCraft, and partners are Four Seasons Maui, 11 Ravens and Robina Benson Design House.
