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Actor Maisy Stella, right, and filmmaker Megan Park, photographed in New York in August.
(Kate Dockeray / For The Times)
I didn’t mean to make the duo behind the coming-of-age comedy “My Old Ass” cry when we met for coffee one August morning in New York. But, to be fair, they made me cry first.
In “My Old Ass,” written and directed by Megan Park, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, the teenage Elliott (Maisy Stella) is preparing to leave her hometown in rural Canada for college when she decides to trip on mushrooms with her best friends in the woods. While extremely high, she’s visited by her future self, played by Aubrey Plaza. “Old Ass,” as Plaza’s elder Elliott is cheekily called, puts her number in her younger counterpart’s phone and soon they are communicating across decades. The result of Elliott trying to heed Old Ass’s advice is an emotional gut punch that had me bawling.
“You know, the title and stuff — maybe people expect one thing and then are quite surprised,” Park says, adding, even older men have reported being “f— up over this movie in a good way.” Stella jumps in to confirm seeing reviews on the social media site Letterboxd that, she says, amount to “Me and this 65-year-old man sobbing.”
Chatting with Park, 38, and Stella, 20, it’s clear how they are able to hit that raw nerve, in part because it feels like you are talking to two versions of the same person. Both arrive in casual chic fashion, wearing oversize tops — Park a big vintage T-shirt and Stella a large bomber jacket — that complement their twin blond locks, Park’s hanging loose and Stella’s pulled back. When I ask them what they learned from each other near the end of our hour-long conversation, the waterworks hit.
“Maisy has truly brought so much joy in my life and has refreshed that for me,” Park says through tears. “And is so loving and kind toward me as an artist and so generous and supportive.” Stella beams back at her.
“It was a very beautiful part of my growing up,” Stella says of her child-star years. “I got very lucky. I know not all child set experiences are as lovely as ours were.”
(Kate Dockeray / For The Times)
Park and Stella have had strangely parallel lives in the entertainment industry. They both grew up in Canada: Park in Lindsay, Ontario, and Stella, an hour’s drive away in Oshawa.
Park’s parents didn’t want her to do too much professional acting at a young age, even though, as she says, “All my friends were series regulars on ‘Degrassi.’ ” After high school, she deferred university, at which point she was cast in the ABC Family soap “The Secret Life of the American Teenager,” playing a Christian girl trying to stay a virgin alongside future star Shailene Woodley as the protagonist who gets pregnant before her freshman year.
Among the titles that have our writing staff stoked: “Gladiator II,” “Wicked,” “Joker: Folie à Deux,” “Blitz,” “Anora,” “We Live in Time” and “The Apprentice.”
Watching Woodley ascend the ranks of Hollywood, Park realized that while she loved being on sets, she wasn’t passionate about being an actor. While filming the 2013 rom-com “The F Word,” her co-star Zoe Kazan encouraged her to write for herself.
Park made her directorial debut with the 2021 drama, “The Fallout,” about a teen (Jenna Ortega) coping in the wake of a shooting at her high school. During the casting for the critically acclaimed film, she met Stella, who was being considered for one of the roles.
“I remember being so upset because there was just no part for her,” Park recalls. “But I remember being like: We’re going to work together on something else.”
Maisy Stella in the movie “My Old Ass.”
(Amazon Studios)
At the time, Stella, who started professionally acting when she was 8, was reentering that world after taking a break to finish high school and do all the things she had romanticized about, like “having a locker and a backpack,” she says. Stella didn’t have those items when she was starring on the country music television series “Nashville” alongside her sister Lennon as the daughters of a diva played by Connie Britton. Just after the Stellas were cast on the show, they shot to internet fame when a video of them harmonizing on a cover of Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend” went viral.
“It was a very beautiful part of my growing up,” she says, looking back on her child-star years. “I got very lucky. I know not all child set experiences are as lovely as ours were.”
But time away from the business renewed her passion for it. While her sister gravitated toward music, Stella fell in love with acting.
That led her to Park. The idea for “My Old Ass” came to Park, a mother of two, when she was living in her childhood bedroom during the pandemic. “It just made me super emotional, thinking about what would I tell my younger self,” she says. “That’s such a universal, fleeting thought, that for some reason I thought I’d love to be in that headspace more.”
She aimed to craft a movie like the feel-good tearjerker classics she still loves, like “Mrs. Doubtfire” and “Stepmom.” But “My Old Ass” has an edge, and not just because of its title. Old Ass tries to cajole Elliott into appreciating her family before she leaves them behind, but also perhaps isn’t so wise herself in some of her advice.
“It just made me super emotional, thinking about what would I tell my younger self,” says Park of the genesis of her original screenplay.
(Kate Dockeray / For The Times)
Park settled on calling it “My Old Ass” before she wrote the movie, naming Elliott’s family — the Labrants — after the gynecologist that delivered her first daughter. The doctor was “sort of shocked and maybe offended” by her title, the director says. “I’m hoping that she sees it and gets it,” Park adds.
Once Stella officially sent in an audition tape, Park’s hunch about her was confirmed. Throughout the process, Park would send the actor parts of the screenplay as she was working on it, asking the younger woman how she would phrase certain things.
“Not only was [Stella] able to take all the special qualities of herself and put [them] on camera, but she also isn’t playing herself,” Park says. “She became a better Elliott than I could have ever imagined.”
For Stella, it was the first time in her life that a director had put faith in her to lead a film. “No one had really ever taken a chance on me since I was a cute 8-year-old,” Stella says.
Park also made Stella, who identifies as pansexual, feel comfortable as she thought about her sexuality in relation to her career. “It’s always been a stressful thing for me ever since I was very young of: If I’m gay, can I act?” she says. “Because then they’re not going to believe me when I kiss a boy.”
Her sister and parents have always been supportive of her, Stella tells me, but Park (who is married to musician and “My Old Ass” co-composer Tyler Hilton) also put her at ease during shooting in Muskoka, Ontario during a Canadian summer. In the film, Elliott, who has always thought she was gay, finds herself confused when she starts to fall for a boy named Chad (Percy Hynes White) who is working on her family’s cranberry farm. The fact that Old Ass warns her against getting involved with Chad complicates matters further.
Park says she didn’t want to make Elliott’s preferences a “huge thing,” but also “loved the idea of a reverse coming-out.”
“It was really important to us, always, that the narrative wasn’t like: She identifies as one thing and she’s like, ‘I’m straight now,’ ” Park says. “I talked to a lot of people who identify as bi and they were like, ‘Thank you.’ ”
The film also has fun with gender roles. When Elliott takes mushrooms for a second time, she imagines herself as Justin Bieber singing “One Less Lonely Girl” to Chad. Park wanted a musical sequence and Stella chose Bieber. “Basically, Megan was like, ‘What’s the performance of your generation that would rile everyone up?’ ” Stella says. It was a sleepover staple as well as a moment of hope for countless Gen-Z girls: During the pop idol’s concerts, he would invite a lucky fan up during the song for a serenade.
Though they had to get Bieber’s approval, Stella can’t fathom the idea that he actually watched her rendition. “In my head, his manager watched it and he never did and he’ll never see it as long as he lives and we’re all good,” she says, nervously.
“No one had really ever taken a chance on me since I was a cute 8-year-old,” says Stella, left, photographed with Park in New York in August.
(Kate Dockeray / For The Times)
It’s moments like these I recognize the generational divide between Park and myself — we’re both in our 30s — and Stella, who can be disarmingly mature. “I feel like I’ll be talking to someone my age and then sometimes I’ll just be snapped to reality,” Parks says to Stella.
Making “My Old Ass,” however, made Stella recognize her own youth.
“When I read the script, I was thinking of it as if I was one of y’all,” she says, addressing me and Park as the Old Asses in the room. “I was just like, ‘Oh I’ve already had all these epiphanies, like, you know, not to take my family for granted. I’m good. I’ve got this figured out.’ And I absolutely 100% did not have it figured out at that point.”
In the two years since finishing the movie, Stella says she has actively put its sincerely conveyed lessons about embracing the messiness of existence into action.
“I think a lot of people who have watched it have genuinely done the same,” she says. “Which is my favorite part of the making of it. It is so fun and happy and it’s a comedy and all these things, but it feels weighted to me.”
And that’s why it’s liable to make audiences cry — no matter how old they are.
