My Old Ass director says Aubrey Plaza didn’t have to look like her time-traveling younger self to be perfect
In the new time travel comedy My old assMaisy Stella and Aubrey Plaza play two versions of the same character, Elliott: one is a young, confident teenager and the other is her older self.
The two actors don’t do that Real seem like picture-perfect matches. But My old ass Director Megan Park said that when casting two sides of the same character, she was looking for something beyond a superficial doppelganger.
“Aubrey asked me, I remember in our first conversation, ‘Do you want me to really study her and try to pick up on her mannerisms? How much of this do you want to try to emulate?'” Park tells Polygon. “And I was like, ‘I don’t think that’s important because so much time has passed and I think you should just immerse yourself in the characters as much as you feel like.’ When we first met and performed together and had dinner together, I could tell that she was really taking Maisy in and doing that work for the character.
“But we try not to focus so much on imitating each other, but more on the fact that there’s a chemistry and a connection, which was there pretty much instantly. Aubrey has younger sisters who are about the same age as Maisy, and Maisy has an older sister. So there was a kind of natural sisterly thing that they fell into quite easily as well and they just loved each other straight away, which was helpful. Luckily, it happened quite organically.”
The timey-wimey storyline begins when young Elliott takes a bunch of psychedelic mushrooms and encounters the older version of herself during her trip. It’s played a bit ambiguous as to whether there’s actual time travel involved or if it’s all in her head. But either way, young Elliott — who’s sassy, brash, and very sure of herself — finds a lot of her preconceptions challenged by her older self. It was important to Park that Elliott convey a very specific kind of energy.
“I hadn’t seen a lot of young women in films who were really cool and down to earth but also really happy and optimistic and kind of sparkly,” Park says. “I don’t know why I hadn’t seen that a lot, but I was really looking for someone who embodied that energy and was really vulnerable and open and loving, and that was hard to find. It was really hard to find that magic combination.”
Landing on Plaza proved to be a little trickier, but once the creative team had figured out exactly what they were looking for and stopped looking for a complete lookalike (“We spent a lot of time figuring out (which potential actors) have blonde hair”), everything fell into place.
“At some point it’s like, Who do we want to see sitting on that block together, joking around and having such a good rapport?” says Park. “As soon as Aubrey’s name came up, it was like, Oh shit, that makes perfect sense.
“It’s also a lot funnier to me that (young Elliott) thinks (Aubrey Plaza) is so old and she’s not even 40,” she adds with a laugh. “And it added a whole other layer of comedy that I really loved.”
My old ass is now in select theaters and worldwide from September 27.