Actor Maisy Stella and Director Megan Park Narrowly Escaped a Bear While Filming ‘My Old Ass’

Every few years, a coming-of-age movie comes along to make adults sob as they remember their lost youth and younger people sob as they realize how quickly time goes by. This year, that movie is My Old Ass, written and directed by Megan Park. The film follows a young woman named Elliott (Maisy Stella) who's about to go to college. To celebrate her birthday, she and her friends (Maddie Ziegler, Kerrice Brooks) take mushrooms, and let's just say their trips are wildly different. Elliott hallucinates a version of her older self, played by Aubrey Plaza, and when she realizes her 39-year-old self is not really that happy in her life, she starts to freak out.

I won't spoil where the film goes from there, but bring tissues, because both times I saw it I cried an embarrassing amount. Maisy and Megan hopped on Zoom with Cosmopolitan to talk about fighting to keep the film's name as-is, where the inspiration for the Saoirse Ronan call came from (IYKYK), and what they would ask their older selves.

[There are light spoilers below for My Old Ass.]

Megan, I'm wondering if anyone ever tried to get you to change the name because of the word "ass."

Megan: When I made that the title, I was like, obviously this is not gonna end up being the title. I did it tongue-in-cheek, being like, I just would love to hear executives say that in a serious setting. Like, here's your contract for My Old Ass. There were definitely conversations early on when we were taking the movie out as a pitch with LuckyChap (Margot Robbie's production company, which produced the film) trying to find the right home, people being like, we love it, but obviously it can't be called that. And that did end up being part of the conversation of who gets the movie or doesn't get it.

Maisy: It honestly is shocking. I forget how shocking it is because I'm so used to the name.

Megan: My mom, like, won't say the title. Luckily my kids can't read yet. My daughter calls it the Maisy movie.

What was it like to film this on location on Lake Muskoka in Canada? I'm imagining crew bonfires, boat rides, a real summer camp vibe.

Megan: All of that, literally everything you just said.

Maisy: Add a jet ski.

Megan: I joke that I found Jesus on the jet ski. It was a really religious experience for me. We boated to dinners, we jet skied. We had some bonfires. I lived in Elliot's house, the location, during all the prep, and then there were two bunkies right outside of the house and Maisy lived in one, and I lived in the other during part of the filming. So we would come home from work and swim and have dinner in Elliot's kitchen.

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When Aubrey first got to Muskoka, we were all having dinner together, and me and the director of photography paddle-boarded over to her cottage, and she was standing on the dock with a bottle of wine, like, who are these freaks? And then we almost all walked home from that dinner back to Aubrey's cabin. And I was like, I feel like there's bears here at night, so I made the decision to drive us all back. And we literally got in the car and pulled out, and there was a giant black bear in the driveway. And I was like, thank god we didn't walk. It got real.

Megan, there are not a lot of filmmakers who are focused on portraying girlhood in this way, which is part of why I love this film. I'm curious, what about this phase of life is so interesting to you as a filmmaker?

Megan: I didn't intentionally set out for my first two movies to be about girlhood, per se. My first movie (The Fallout), I'm a millennial. I grew up in Canada, and I just honestly couldn't fathom the fact that American teenagers were going to school every day with the threat of being shot. With this new movie, this feeling of nostalgia and being home in Canada, that was the birthplace of this idea. Coming-of-age movies about girlhood are those comfort films for me that I go back to and rewatch from my generation. So it was really fun to try to tap into that and make something that felt, hopefully, timeless and nostalgic.

I want to hear both of your perspectives on Maisy getting the part. Maisy, I know you said you made a boat tour video.

Maisy: The audition process was interesting because it was all on Zoom.

Megan: It was a little sneaky, becauseI found out you had a boat, and she had read for the part, and the producers didn't know you had a boat. And I was like, you should just go tour your boat. And then we sent it along with your tape.

Maisy: I had already been taping, I think, a couple times, and I was just being stupid, and went and like, here's my corridor of my tiny boat. I was just doing anything I possibly could. I was just so eager.

How many actual shooting days did you have with Aubrey? I was really struck by the chemistry, Maisy, that you and her have, but I imagine that a lot of her work was in an ADR booth.

Maisy: She was only filming in person for like, a week, and then the rest was ADR. She had been watching dailies of me filming for two weeks, so I think she knew me a little bit, and I obviously knew her, but not in a personal way, but it was pretty immediate when we met. Everyone that was working on this movie, the second you get to Muskoka, it's so disarming. I keep using the word tender. Everyone was so tender during the making of it. She already is a tender human. And I think the movie, the concept of it was moving for her.

Megan: She just adored Maisy, and was so taken with her. We showed her Maisy's tape and some of the dailies, and she was just really blown away. She definitely studied the physicality. We talked about, it's not important that you mimic each other. But as soon as she got there, we got to spend a couple dinners hanging out. It was pretty fast. Five days of filming.

Maisy: It was just a lucky thing that we got on and we clicked.

Maisy, I know the inclusion of the Justin Bieber song "One Less Lonely Girl" was your idea. The scene existed, but you picked the song, and I'm wondering if you went back and watched any concert footage from that era to prepare?

Maisy: Oh, I 100 percent did. I really wanted to channel him. I felt like I already had him within me, and I already done a lot of studying of Bieber in my day. I wasn't starting from scratch by any means. I already had watched a lot. That reference, "One Less Lonely Girl," that was very significant, very important to me. I did watch a lot of videos of him.

Percy Hynes White was really giving teenage girl in that scene.

Maisy: He had a fishtail braid coming across his forehead, which killed me.

Megan: I wish we had filmed the first time he got to see the three of you guys do the dance. He was in awe.

Maisy: He was the one less lonely girl.

Megan, there's a big tearjerker scene towards the end of the film where Elliott's mom tell her this story about when she couldn't sleep as a baby. Where did the inspiration for that story come from? I was crying.

Megan: That's probably the most personal scene to me in the whole movie. That was ripped straight from my perspective as a mother. I remember writing that scene after I'd had that exact experience with my daughter singing "Twinkle, Twinkle," and the two pacifiers, one in each hand, like that was straight from the heart for me. That was very personal to me from the mom's perspective.

Where did the idea for the Saoirse Ronan wall come from?

Megan: I don't know. My brain's a weird place. I love Saoirse Ronan. I just love the idea of the little brother being obsessed with Saoirse. I can't really explain it, but it just felt right. And she was a real trooper. I think Margot Robbie, one of our producers, has worked with Saoirse and they're friends. I didn't realize, of course, we'd have to get her permission to have her face all over it and reference her. I've heard that she was like, super down. I think her agent saw it was like, it's such a sweet homage to Saoirse.

Maisy: It really is so sweet. It's so wholesome.

Megan: Who doesn't love Saoirse Ronan, is the real question.

Margot Robbie, Megan Park, and Maisy Stella at the premiere of My Old Ass.

Maisy, if you got the chance to ask your 39-year-old self something like your character gets to in the movie, what would you ask yourself?

Maisy: I'm so scared of the future, and I'm so scared of the future of the world. All I would ask was, like, worldly questions. Please tell me, who's the president? Like, what's going on? I wouldn't really care too much about what I was up to. Like, do we still have trees? Is there still water?

Megan, if you got to jump forward to ask your 65-year-old self something, what would it be?

Megan: Oh, god, it's scary. I don't know that I would want to. You know what? I'd be like, what should I invest in? Who's the next Starbucks?

It's not insider trading if it's yourself in the future, right? [Editor's note: For legal reasons I need to clarify this is a joke.]

Megan: There's no way that's gonna hurt, right? That's the next movie.