If you could talk to your 18-year-old self, what would you say? Perhaps you’d warn them that life goes fast, so enjoy it. You might describe what real love feels like. Maybe you’d ask them to wear more moisturiser. Or tell them to be nice to mum. In My Old Ass – where Aubrey Plaza’s Elliott goes back in time to visit her teenage self, played by Maisy Stella – these are the nuggets of wisdom she decides to pass on.
“After reading the script, I just wanted to call my mom and tell her I loved her,” Stella tells me over video call from a London hotel. She’s wearing a blue blazer; her blonde hair is pulled back into a ponytail and her hands are covered in rings. This is her film debut, and her excitement is palpable. “I already had that feeling of love inside me, but this film was such a smack in the face reminder of it,” she smiles. “Since making it, I’ve experienced life in a much more present way.”
My Old Ass is a paean to childhood. Set on the glittering lakes of Ontario over one long, hot Canadian summer, it’s also a meditation on that feeling of time slipping through our fingers. Stella’s Elliott, who lives and works on her parents’ cranberry farm in Muskoka, plans to spend her last weeks before leaving for college making out with a local girl and ignoring her family. But then, on her 18th birthday, she and a group of friends go to the woods and neck a load of magic mushrooms. It’s all going swimmingly, until her 39-year-old self (Plaza) pops up and interrupts her trip.
At first, Elliott is disappointed to learn that two decades down the line, she’s a single PhD student, rather than having a big family and a dream career. But gradually, once she’s over the suspicion that Plaza is just a “figment of my f***ed up mushroom brain”, she starts to listen. The message from her older self, to focus on and cherish those around her, begins to sink in.
Stella connected with the film straight away. “I am clinically nostalgic,” says the 20-year-old. “I can’t look at my mom and dad or my sister without my eyes welling up. I very, very much experience the feeling of time slipping away.” Stella, who was 18 during filming, slips into the role of Elliott like a tin boat onto a blue Muskoka lake – with her messy blonde ponytail and wide eyes that drink in her surroundings, she gives an instinctive, naturalistic performance that deftly captures the energy, curiosity and precarity of that age.
There is a love story at the centre of the film. Elliott, who through her teens has always been interested in girls, starts to fall for a sweet, skinny boy called Chad (Percy Hynes White). “Am I bi?” she wonders aloud, to which her nonbinary friend Ro (Kerrice Brooks) replies: “Just because you like a man doesn’t make you any less queer. I don’t think any less of you.” It’s a great line, and refreshing to see a film where heterosexuality isn’t presumed. “I think the queer aspect of this movie is so moving in the right direction,” says Stella. “Megan [Park, the director] was so cautious and careful, and listened to us and all the people in the cast that are queer. She wanted it to feel genuine.”
Stella, meanwhile, “wanted Elliott to feel like a young person experiencing life for the first time”. “That is what it is,” she says. “And I think it’s beautiful how it’s open-ended. Labels can feel stressful and scary, and that line from Ro has always been one of my favourites, because it’s such a bold thing to have in a movie. I feel like it embodies someone that’s just an open being, and falls in love with a human and not a gender.”
Elliott realises how hard she’s fallen for Chad when, on another shroom trip, she hallucinates that she’s on stage as Justin Bieber, singing his 2009 hit “One Less Lonely Girl” to hordes of adoring fans. In the fantasy, Chad comes up from the crowd and Elliott – dressed all in white with a backwards cap – serenades him. This wonderful scene was not in the original script, but when the film was put together, the director felt it needed something extra. Park asked Stella to think of an iconic performance that everyone in her generation was obsessed with, and she thought of the Bieber moment straight away. “I remember being a kid at sleepovers and watching the videos of him pulling someone up from the crowd,” she says. “It was this massive deal.”
The scene ended up being her favourite thing to film “ever in existence”. “It was an absolute honour,” she says. “I won the lottery with that scene. And I could not shake it off. The way that I walked and the way that I talked all kind of changed after that.” She bursts into laughter. Has Bieber seen the sequence? “I think he had to watch it to approve it being in the movie, so yes, I think Bieber has watched it, which is actually the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. It makes me wanna crawl in a hole, but also…” she gives a faux-angelic smile, “I hope he likes it.”
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Stella was born in Oshawa, on the Lake Ontario shoreline, just a few hours’ drive away from Elliott. She is the daughter of country music duo The Stellas – Marylynne and Brad – who moved the family to Nashville when Stella was five to compete in Can You Duet, an American Idol type of show for duet partners. Three years after the move, Stella and her older sister, Lennon, were cast in the musical TV drama Nashville, playing the daughters of Connie Britton’s fading country music superstar. Stella’s whole childhood, really, was steeped in music – she woke up to Huey Lewis crooning on vinyl every morning. “I grew up in a very inspired, creative and alive house,” she says, “there were always people over and always jams and music around me.”
No one’s really supposed to know what it feels like to be known by the world
She and Lennon, she thinks, were destined to be on screen. “My sister used to make a cardboard box TV, and I would go inside of it and she would flip the channels. I would be like, ‘Add three tablespoons of sugar,’ like in a cooking show, then we’d do a soap opera scene.” When a family friend who’d seen the girls play this game spotted a casting call for Nashville, she told Stella’s mum: “These kid needs to do this.”
While Stella grew up on TV, her parents tried to keep life as normal as possible. She left traditional school at the age of 11 and did online learning, or on-set classes, for a few years, before returning to school at around 15 years old when the show ended. “I made sure my head was nice and screwed on before I kept working, and got really special years of going to prom and doing all the things that I’d really romanticised in my head and craved.”
My Old Ass is Stella’s first return to acting since she finished school, but she’s already wrapped on another movie, a sci-fi dinosaur film called Flowervale Street with Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor. “It was the coolest thing ever being their kid,” she grins. Plot details are under wraps, but it’s set to be one of the biggest releases of next year. Stella’s not sure how she feels about the idea of becoming a household name. “I haven’t even allowed my brain to go there,” she says. “No one’s really supposed to know what it feels like to be known by the world, it’s very odd.” She pauses to think. “But it’s also a beautiful thing for expressing yourself and sharing art.”
Amazon MGM Studios ‘My Old Ass’ is out now in cinemas in the UK and Ireland
Read more Rising Stars interviews on The Independent here