Oscar Bait Dispatch: My Old Ass
“I dream about being bored. And it never happens,” Aubrey Plaza said, while reflecting on what she misses most from her childhood. Sitting alongside writer/director Megan Park and actress Maisy Stella, the Parks & Recreation actress was kicking off the first round of awards season press conferences on Monday for the trio’s film, My Old Ass.
Plaza may only have about 20 minutes of screentime in the coming-of-age comedy that earned raves out of Sundance earlier this year, but it’s one of the best performances of her career. It’s also one of the most rewarding for her personally. “I was having a moment with Megan and Maisy where it felt real. You just don't always have people that want to really try to find truthful moments. Most of the time when you're on set, it's like, ‘We gotta go, we gotta go, we gotta go, we gotta rush!’”
On paper, My Old Ass seems like the type of movie few would be talking about ten months after its premiere. Part light time-travel flick, part stoner comedy, the film follows Elliott (Stella), a wiseacre teenager rebelling against becoming a third-generation cranberry farmer in rural Canada. Deciding to take some shrooms on her 18th birthday, she comes face-to-face with her “not middle aged” self (Plaza), an unhappy millennial still struggling through a PhD program and her stunted romantic life. As the two communicate, they begin to realize that, while they can’t change the past or shape the future, they can embrace the life they have and those they take for granted.
The greatest strength of Park’s follow up to her 2021 school shooting drama The Fallout is its refusal to get bogged down in clunky exposition and the minutiae of time travel. “I'm not like a sci-fi person,” Park said. “I don’t really like movies like that. So I thought a lot about movies like Mrs. Doubtfire and 13 Going on 30 where there's this huge buy in, but it's such an emotional, human story that you don't really care about the buy in after the first 30 seconds of it.”
While My Old Ass is the type of smart and soulful indie one would expect of Plaza and Park, it’s also a showcase for Stella to prove herself as one of Gen Z’s most formidable talents. For the former Nashville child star and current Music City resident, the film allowed her to both reflect on her younger years and show her she still had a lot to learn. “I feel like I read the script as the old ass,” Stella said. I read it being like, ‘Oh, Elliot. Like, girl. Like, so naive. I already have all this figured out.’ And I really didn't. It changed a lot for me I think.”
What makes Elliott so relatable is that her struggles speak across gender and generations. “I've been surprised by just how many men over 70 have loved the movie and cried a lot in it,” Park said.
During a flurry of press tours this fall for projects as varied as Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis and Marvel’s Agatha All Along, Plaza had similar experiences. “Howard Stern loves it,’ she said. “I went in to do the Howard Stern interview. I didn't know what I was going be talking about, because I had the other projects too. That was the one that he loved. And I was like, ‘Howard Stern loves My Old Ass.’”
My Old Ass is now playing in theaters and debuts November 7th on Prime Video.