In My Old Ass, a sweetly engaging new comedy from writer-director Megan Park, a girl named Elliott (Maisy Stella) does mushrooms with her friends on her 18th birthday—only to then receive a shocking visit from her 39-year-old future self (Aubrey Plaza). If the raven-haired star of Parks and Recreation and The White Lotus doesn’t bear much physical resemblance to 20-year-old Stella, best known until now for playing Daphne Conrad on Nashville, that only works to the story’s advantage, highlighting the many unimaginable ways our lives can shift between high school and adulthood.

This week, Vogue spoke to Plaza and Stella about working together to realize Park’s vision for Elliott, honoring Justin Bieber, and climate anxiety.

Vogue: What part of seeing the film come out are you guys most excited for?

Maisy Stella: I mean, it’s really crazy, because we filmed it two years ago, and I know you’ve made a million things since then, Aubrey, but I’m just like, This is it for me.

Aubrey Plaza: You just made a huge movie. Stop it.

Stella: Okay, yes, but that was recently. I’ve just been holding it so close and squeezing it so tight, and I had such a good time making it. It actually coming out feels so mind-blowing to me. And it being a real thing that people can go and watch is so exciting. The response has been so, so, so lovely, so I’m excited for it to come out.

Plaza: I’m excited for the world to meet this one, and to see how talented she is. [Gestures to Stella]. I think it’s going to be really, really, really exciting for people to kind of get to know Maisy as an actress. There’s nobody like you, and it’s really fun to watch. I think people are going to be really excited about that.

What was the process of playing two halves of the same character like?

Stella: I think we did it in maybe, like, a weird way, because we found a natural flow with each other. It was really fast. Aubrey was only in Muskoka [in Ontario, where the movie was filmed] a week or two, so we kind of had to dive straight in, which I think, honestly, was a good thing, because it made us instantly go to the belly of it all.

Plaza: We didn’t overthink it, and that was one thing about the director, Megan Park, that was so awesome. She was not caught up in the literal details of you have to look the same or whatever. It was more about capturing each other’s essence and spirit and the spirit of Elliott. Before I came to set, they sent me some dailies of Maisy, because she had already started shooting, so I got a preview. I got a first look, and I got to see some of what she was doing on camera, and I was like, Oh, my God, she’s amazing. She’s incredible. The work is so good. And so I kind of came in with a little bit of an idea, and then when we met, it was just instant fun. We were having fun with each other.

Maisy, I would love to know how you approached embodying Justin Bieber in the movie’s extremely fun musical number.

Stella: I am such a Bieber fan, and as a kid, “One Less Lonely Girl” was so significant to me.

Plaza: That’s why it’s in the movie. It was her idea.

Stella: It’s a real thing for me. There wasn’t too much getting into character. I just had to call upon his spirit. It was so fun. I watched the video so many times when I was younger, and Maddie [Ziegler] and Kerrice Brooks are both dancers, so they taught me the full dance and helped me get into it. The outfit really helped; like, the purple hat and little mic were my armor.

The generational divide between young and old(er) Elliott leads to some great and prescient jokes about climate anxiety and the future of the planet. How did those come about?

Stella: There were little jokes written, but I feel like that kind of escalated in ADR.

Plaza: I think Megan was very, very smart about picking and choosing those moments, because she felt like, if you go too far with it, then it starts to beg a lot more questions. It had to be handled in the right way. I think on the set, maybe we improvised a couple things, like around the campfire or something, and some of it made it in and some of it didn’t. And then in the voiceover part, Megan pitched me some weird stuff. She was like, “I think you should just yell, like, ‘basement’ three times, because, I don’t know, it just feels like something happening in the future.” And I was like, “All right.” It was weirdly specific but also restrained, which I think was smart.

If you could meet yourself in 20 years, what questions would you have?

Stella: We’ve talked about this being such a scary question, because, like, there really are kind of right and wrong answers to that, morally. There are things that you should ask…like, if you’re given the chance to save the world, then you should, probably.

Plaza: What I want in this moment, as a 40-year-old person who’s alive, is just for my 70-year-old self to appear to me and be like, “Hi.”

Stella: You deserve that.

Source: Vogue