The summer Maisy Stella turned 18, her life changed. While most young adults are soaking in their last moments before college, Stella was on the set of My Old Ass reigniting her love for acting, which had laid dormant for years. Her coming of age has played out both in real life and on film—as her career has blossomed, Stella’s gone from a child star growing up in front of the camera to a fully fledged actor on a mission for self-discovery.
The 20-year-old Canadian has been in the entertainment business since she was eight, a child star in the country music primetime soap Nashville. Now, she’s making her cinematic debut in the heartfelt drama My Old Ass, actor-turned-director Megan Park’s sophomore film following 2021’s The Fallout (for which Stella and her sister, Lennon Stella, contributed “While You Sleep” to the soundtrack). My Old Ass arrives ahead of Stella’s role in David Robert Mitchell’s sci-fi thriller Flowervale Street, opposite Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor, due next year.
When I meet the fresh-faced newcomer on Zoom, she’s perched on her hotel bed during her first day in New York City. Glammed up from a TV interview with a frilly, oversize bow framing her grin, she’s handling all the excitement with a youthful exuberance. That energy is shared by her My Old Ass character, the boisterous Elliott. In the film, Elliott is making the most of her last summer before college. But an 18th birthday mushroom trip with her two best friends (Maddie Ziegler and Kerrice Brooks) leads to Elliott’s 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza) appearing with a stern warning not to fall in love this summer. The only problem? Elliott’s crush is just around the corner.
Although there are kisses in the rain and summer montages, don’t mistake My Old Ass for a saccharine coming-of-ager. The charming film is a hearty portrait of young womanhood and an unpatronizing plea not to let time slip through your fingers. In one campfire moment, Plaza delivers the line, “The only thing you can’t get back is time.” Has there been a moment in Stella’s life where she realized this for herself? “My mom’s mom passed away a year ago, and before the last time I saw her, I remember looking at her and being like ‘Oh my gosh, she’s really old,’” the actress recalls. “I was little in her arms, and now we’re in such different physical forms. That was very much a trigger: I can’t take things too seriously because time moves so quickly.”
With that mind-set, My Old Ass was all the more relatable to Stella. “Elliott was pretty easy for me to channel,” Stella says. “I’d just had my last summer at home and experienced that moment of looking at your mom and saying, ‘I’m sorry that I’ve accidentally been hurting you for the past four years.’” My Old Ass was a learning experience that involved observing the heavily women-led crew, including Park, Plaza, and producer Margot Robbie. “I turned my ears on at all times,” Stella recounts with a grin. “It felt very safe… I learned so much from [Plaza], the fact that I got to be in a movie with her alone would have been the coolest thing of my life.”
Solidarity in girlhood has been a recurring theme for Stella. Not only has she been best friends with her costar Ziegler since she was nine (“We manifested this, we always said we’re gonna film a movie together!”), but for most of her life, she also worked opposite her older sister and biggest supporter, Lennon. As well as performing together as the country music duo Lennon & Maisy (following in their parents’ country-duo, The Stellas, footsteps), the pair starred in Nashville for the show’s entire run, from 2012 to 2018.
“The ending of Nashville was at such a crazy time in my life,” Stella says, paushing to choose her next words carefully. “It was the year my parents split up and my sister moved out. I went from working every single day to it being me and my mom in the house, like: ‘What the fuck?’ All of a sudden, I wasn’t important anymore. That sounds dark and horrible, [but] it was important that I felt unimportant.” Upon reflection, she went back to school, attended prom, and had experiences she’d romanticized while working. Although she’d been auditioning post-Nashville, having a break from acting to exist in the real world gave her a grounding that informed her impressively charismatic and natural performance (though she admits she doesn’t like that word).
Kerrice Brooks as Ro, Maisy Stella as Elliott, and Maddie Ziegler as Ruthie in My Old Ass.
Courtesy of Amazon Studios
While she’s taking in all the praise of My Old Ass—which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January to rave reviews and is now in theaters—on the horizon is Flowervale Street, which the actress shot earlier this year. While Stella was front and center of My Old Ass’s indie set, Flowervale Street proved starkly different. “I loved being a part of a movie and getting to admire the people who were holding it up,” Stella explained. Also, she had the guiding force of the “flower in human form” Hathaway, whose role as Stella’s mother bled into real life: “She made sure I had electrolytes in my water every single day and she would offer me keys to her house on the weekends to make sure I was comfortable,” Stella recalls.
Having grown up watching coming-of-age dramas, Stella hopes for more roles where she can tap into a grounded and raw nature—the sorts of moving performances that actors like Saoirse Ronan, Sadie Sink, and Hunter Schafer would take on. Despite her changing outlook on life, one thing remains true: “I just love films so much,” Stella says. “I get so excited by the idea of being a part of the things that I love watching.”