To Make My Old Ass, Megan Park Had to Confront a Teenage Dream

“I don’t think I’ve really been in love,” a then teenage Maisy Stella ventured on the set of her very first movie. “I don’t know, I’ve had crushes on people and stuff. How would you describe real love?” she asked her director Megan Park, now 38.

“I kind of feel like healthy love is safety and freedom,” Park told Stella. It’s a line that wound up in Park’s script for her poignant coming-of-age film, My Old Ass. When Elliott, the film’s main character, hears it, she doesn’t exactly embrace the observation. Neither did Stella, who plays Elliott. “She really did look at me like, ‘Cool. That doesn’t sound very hot, but cool,’” Park recalls in a recent Zoom. “I’d never felt older in my entire life.”

In the two years since they finished the movie, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year before landing in theaters on September 13, Stella fell in love. “It really is safety and freedom, I get it now,” she told Park, who replied, “See? I was your Old Ass in that moment.”

We see many similar exchanges play out in My Old Ass, in which Elliott comes face-to-face with her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza) while on a mushroom trip. It is younger Elliott’s final summer before college, and she plans to (often literally) sail through her remaining days in her sleepy, if picturesque town of Lake Muskoka. She has no interest in becoming a cranberry farmer like her parents, but older Elliott insists that her teenage self spend time with their family—and avoid a boy named Chad (Percy Hynes White) at all costs. To ensure she heeds that warning, older Elliott puts her number in her younger self’s phone under the contact name “My Old Ass.”

Maisy Stella as Elliott in My Old Ass.Courtesy of Prime

It wasn’t a hallucinogen that inspired Park’s second feature film as a writer-director. (“The mushrooms came much later,” she says with a smile.) Park sets the scene: “I just had my first child and was sleeping in my childhood bedroom during the pandemic, just feeling really nostalgic—probably had gone through the family albums that day or something. I started thinking, Wait, there was a time when we all just slept here and it was the last time before life moved on. I used to make Spice Girls dance videos with my friends all the time. And when was the last time we did that?”

Park knows she tends toward being, as Stella once put it, “clinically nostalgic”: “I’m the type of person where it’s better that I don’t know it’s the last time something’s happening because then it takes all the joy out of it for me.” So she couldn’t help ruminating on what a conversation with her younger self might entail.

Park was still very much an adolescent when she starred in her own first film, a 2004 Lifetime drama called She’s Too Young. “I was 15 years old, playing a girl who got syphilis, and Marcia Gay Harden was the mom—that’s pretty much all I remember,” she laughs when reminded of the project. “My friend, who’s since become a teacher, messaged me at one point, ‘I’m subbing for a 10th-grade health class, and they’re playing She’s Too Young.’” “Wow, that’s kind of cool,” she recalls thinking, “but also a little embarrassing.”

In the years since, she became accustomed to a bit of teenage melodrama. Park spent years starring as a puritanical teen on ABC Family’s The Secret Life of the American Teenager. “That was college for me,” says Park. “Shailene [Woodley] is one of my best friends.”

Five seasons on Secret Life gave Park an unwitting crash course in filmmaking. “I really did get so comfortable, just being on a sound stage every day for 100-plus episodes. All these amazing people came through that set,” says Park. “I got to work with Jennifer Coolidge. Jason Priestley directed [multiple episodes]. At that point, I had no idea I was going to be writing and directing, but he was always very encouraging of us breaking out of that box: ‘Do you want to work the camera on this shot? Do you want to hold the boom?’ So the tidbits that I picked up was my film school. And that was sometimes doing and saying hilariously ridiculous things that people still send me memes of.”

Greg Finley, Megan Park, Daren Kagasoff, Shailene Woodley, Ken Baumann, and Francia Raisa in The Secret Life of the American Teenager.Bob D’Amico/Getty Images

Though Park kept acting—she met her husband, Tyler Hilton, on the set of 2007’s Charlie Bartlett, and her most recent credit is 2021’s Hallmark rom-com A Royal Queens Christmas—she pivoted to off-camera work with 2021’s The Fallout, her SXSW-winning debut about the aftermath of a school shooting, starring Jenna Ortega. And these days, Park isn’t exactly itching to be back onscreen. “I don’t miss it at all. My absolute idea of hell would be directing myself in something,” she says. “Right now I get so much joy from writing and directing that I never really felt being in front of the camera. There’s this funny Macaulay Culkin meme where he’s a kid and they’re like, ‘What are your five favorite on-set sayings?’ He’s like: ‘That’s a wrap, go to lunch, have a good weekend.’ That was me when I was an actor.”

It all brings to mind a line from My Old Ass, uttered by older Elliott to younger Elliott: “This isn’t the last time that you get everything you want and realize it wasn’t really what you wanted.” Although Park felt fortunate to make a living in front of the camera, it didn’t feed her soul. “I remember when Shai really wanted to get that movie, The Descendants,” she recalls of the Oscar-winning Alexander Payne drama starring George Clooney. Woodley’s first audition was unsuccessful, but Park remembers her friend’s determination to get the part anyway. “I was like, ‘Whoa, I never felt that way about any script.’ But I understand that feeling now. I know what I want.”

Park has taken her experiences as a young performer into her next chapter as a writer-director, welcoming the chance to offer people like Stella their first film roles. “I like the freshness of that,” says Park, “Sometimes they don’t know how to stand on a mark or do all these other things, but I’d much rather have the authenticity than the technical perfection.”

Park says it’s a coincidence that her films have cast many former child actors, like The Fallout star Jenna Ortega and Dance Moms breakout Maddie Ziegler. That said, “they’ve told me some pretty wild stories—between Jenna and Maddie and Maisy,” she says. “It definitely informs how I approached the whole vibe on set.” As a young actor, she says her opinion was rarely welcomed; “I remember being put in an outfit that some 65-year-old dude told me was cool when I was 18, but I felt so insecure and awful—and that throws the whole performance,” she says. Park runs her own sets differently. “It’s about creating this really open dynamic where the young actors can be like, ‘Megan, that joke, you’re dating yourself as a millennial,’ which they did.”

As a result, her films tackle topical issues while somehow feeling timeless. “Coming of age has, recently, gotten a bad reputation,” she says. “When I was growing up, there was just as much gravitas given to coming-of-age movies as any other movie.” She cites “those Chris Columbus, classic-feeling movies” like Stepmom and Mrs. Doubtfire, as well as Home Alone, Now and Then, and My Girl as inspirations: “Those movies would make you laugh, but were also so fucking sad, had so much heart, and had young people that everybody took really seriously. Coming of age can really be at any point in your life about any different experience,” she says. “It’s just the first time you go through something.”

The entire world was going through something during the release of Park’s first film, thanks to the pandemic. “I, to this day, have never seen that movie with an audience,” says Park. “In a weird, fucked-up way it felt like it never really happened. So there was a bit of naivete where I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll just do it again.’”

Maddie Ziegler and Jenna Ortega in The Fallout.By Warner Bros/Everett Collection.

The biggest lesson Park learned while making The Fallout was how to trust an audience enough to withhold information from them. She brought that knowledge to My Old Ass too. “A really tricky part was how much to give away about the future,” Park says. “Because we did not want to open the doors to this whole butterfly effect thing. If people walk away being like, ‘I wonder what’s going on in her day-to-day life?’ we kind of fucked up.” So she intentionally kept her script vague, leaving only intriguing tidbits about the future Plaza’s Elliott occupies. We learn that salmon is scarce, so young Elliott should “eat it while it’s still around,” and that reality TV scion Penelope Disick is now a transcendental meditation leader.

Park needed approval for that name-drop, as she did for a few other starry shout-outs—like when Elliott’s younger brother Spencer (Carter Trozzolo) builds a shrine to Saoirse Ronan in his older sister’s soon-to-be vacant bedroom. “Saoirse is a friend of [My Old Ass producer] Margot Robbie, so they sent her the script and she thought it was very sweet,” says Park. Later in the film, Elliott performs an unconventional rendition of Justin Bieber’s “One Less Lonely Girl.” Though Bieber’s team approved the scripted sequence, they reserved the right to later reject the number. “What if he hated it? What if he thought it was weird?” Park says. “But we were like, ‘Fuck it, we’re filming it anyway. He’s a Canadian boy, he’s been to Muskoka. We’re going to hope he gets this.’”

Before those sign-offs were secured, Park had to find her Elliotts. The charismatic Stella, a former child star who headlined six seasons of the musical series Nashville alongside her older sister Lennon, was cast after “10,000” girls auditioned, Stella previously told VF. Older Elliott proved an even trickier find. “If you were to make this within the traditional studio system, nine times out of 10 they’d make you cast the star, the older character, first and then craft your younger Elliott around that,” says Park. But she credits her producers at Indian Paintbrush and LuckyChap with understanding the value in first casting younger Elliott. “She’s in every frame of the movie. So they were open-minded to not only casting somebody who was essentially unknown—Maisy hadn’t acted since she was a little kid—but then crafting older Elliott around her.”

The only problem? Park had originally written the character to be in her 50s, and felt limited by the need to cast someone who resembled Stella.“The energy just didn’t feel right, especially the more I got to know Maisy,” says Park. “I kept thinking, When we pan over on the log, I don’t see that person there. We were getting down to the wire. We had actually started filming the movie, and I still hadn’t settled on who I wanted that person to be.” She decided to change course: “Let’s just fuck this whole ‘who has blonde hair and looks most like Maisy’ thing. Who do we love?”

Maisy Stella and Aubrey Plaza as younger and older Elliott in My Old Ass.Photo: Shane Mahood

Plaza’s name leaped off a page of potential actors. “There was nobody but her,” recalls Park. “For some reason, in my head the whole thing clicked. Everybody was kind of like, ‘Well, she really doesn’t look at all like Maisy, and she’s 15 years younger than the character you’ve written.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, but her energy.’ I could just see them together, and they were such a ying to each other’s yangs, but so similar also.” So she aged-down older Elliott—and had younger Elliott comment on some of their physical differences, like Plaza’s tooth gap (“Fuck you, wear your retainer,” she retorts in the film). “It was funnier all of a sudden,” recalls Park. “She thinks this girl’s so fucking old. The movie’s called My Old Ass and she’s not even 40.”

If she were ever to encounter her own Young Ass, what would Park warn her about? First, she’d encourage financial literacy. “And I’m not even saying invest in Apple,” says Park, “I’m just saying the sooner you feel empowered to be independent in that way, do it because…No.” She stops. “Fuck that answer. I have a better one: Go to therapy way earlier. Even when you feel like everything’s fine, just go to therapy. Start at 18, and you don’t have to catch up.”

Inside the Hive Breaks Down the Presidential Debate, the GOP’s Extreme Policies, and More