My Old Ass director says Aubrey Plaza didn’t need to look like her time-traveling younger self to be perfect

In the new time-travel comedy My Old Ass, Maisy 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 really look like picture-perfect matches. But My Old Ass director Megan Park said that she was looking for something beyond just a superficial lookalike in casting two sides of a single character. 

“Aubrey asked me, I remember in our first call, ‘Do you want me to really study her and try to pick up on her mannerisms? How much of this do you want to be trying to mimic?’” Park tells Polygon. “And I was like, ‘I don’t think that’s important, because so much time has passed and I think as much as you feel like you need to get into the characters.’ When we first all met and hung out and had dinner together, I could tell she was really taking Maisy in and doing that work for the character. 

“But we try not to focus as much on it being an imitation of one another as much as just there being this chemistry and this rapport, which was pretty instantaneous. Aubrey has younger sisters who are close to Maisy’s age, and Maisy has an older sister. So there was kind of this natural sisterly thing they also fell into quite easily and they just really adored each other right away, which was helpful. It luckily happened fairly organically.” 

The timey-wimey plotline kicks off when young Elliott takes a whole lot of psychedelic mushrooms, and during her trip, ends up encountering the older version of herself. It’s played pretty ambiguously as to whether there’s actual time travel involved or if it’s all in her head. But regardless, young Elliott — who is brash, bold, and very sure of herself — gets a lot of her preconceived notions challenged by her older self. It was important for Park that Elliott convey a very specific sort of energy. 

“I hadn’t seen a lot of young women in movies who were very cool and grounded, but were also very bright and cheery and optimistic and sort of sparkly,” Park says. “I don’t know why I hadn’t seen that a lot, but I was really looking for somebody who embodied that energy and was very vulnerable and open and loving, and it was difficult to find. It was kind of difficult to find that magical combination.”

Landing on Plaza was a little trickier, but once the creative team narrowed in on what they were looking for and separated from trying to find a complete lookalike (“We spent a lot of time getting caught up in [which potential actors] have blond hair”) it all clicked together. 

“At a certain point it’s like, Who do we want to see sitting on that log together bantering and having that kind of rapport?” Park says. “As soon as Aubrey’s name came up, it was like, Oh shit, that makes perfect sense.

“It’s also so much 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 out in select theaters now, and everywhere on Sept. 27.