Maisy Stella didn’t have a TV as a kid because her musician parents didn’t want her and her older sister, Lennon, tuning in and tuning out. So the girls used their imaginations. “My sister made a cardboard- box TV that I would get in, and she had a fake cardboard remote,” Stella says. “I’d do a baking show, and then she’d be like, ‘Soap opera!’ and I’d be like, ‘You killed my husband!’ We would do that for hours. That was our entertainment.” Only later, when the girls landed roles as Connie Britton’s children on the country music drama Nashville, did their mother and father relent. “We bought a TV the day that me and my sister got on TV.”
Now 20, Stella has broken through as the wry lead of the irresistible coming-of-age comedy My Old Ass, which Amazon MGM Studios bought after it beguiled audiences at the Sundance Film Festival early this year. The movie, in theaters September 13, is about a teenage girl named Elliott who’s eager to grow up and get away from her family’s lake-town cranberry farm—until a dose of especially potent psychedelic shrooms triggers a ghost-of-Christmas- future-style visit from her 39-year-old self, played by Aubrey Plaza. Older Elliott comes bearing wisdom and warnings about regrets to come. Most of it involves telling younger Elliott how to avoid heartbreaks and to appreciate the people in her life before they’re gone. Some of it’s more practical, like “Wear your retainer!”
Stella was born in Ontario and essentially grew up on camera during six seasons on Nashville, which she joined at the age of eight. The show featured many songs she wrote with her sister and propelled their YouTube channel to around 720,000 sub- scribers. In the years since, Stella has become an old hand at the ups and downs of Holly- wood, making her reluctant to get too excited for a project that might fall apart or not go her way. When she read writer-director Megan Park’s script for My Old Ass, however, she felt “instant anxiety” at the idea of not getting the role, especially since she’d heard “10,000 girls” auditioned for it. “I knew how bad I wanted it, and I knew how right it felt,” Stella says. “So I just went full-on. I have a shitty tuna-can boat, just like Elliott, and I sent the producers a video of me giving a tour of my boat.”
Clothing by Ferragamo; shoes by Christian Louboutin; socks by Calzedonia. Throughout: hair products by Kérastase Paris; makeup products by Victoria Beckham Beauty; nail enamel by Chanel Le Vernis.Photograph by Daria Kobayashi Ritch; Styled by Mindy Le Brock.
In the movie, Elliott has only ever fallen for other girls, but her unexpected yearning for a local guy—someone her older self warns her to stay away from no matter what— complicates her sense of identity, leading to hilarious, genre-tweaking conversations with her best friends (as well as her future self ) about who she is and what she really wants. “I know so many people that have had such similar experiences,” Stella says. “I think it’s much less common to be sure of what you want. I mean, I’ve always been queer. I’m in a queer relationship. But I’ve always been open, and I’ve never been explicitly one thing. I’ve been given the space and the room to not put a label on myself.”
Now that the buzz around My Old Ass has raised her profile in Hollywood, Stella is plotting her next moves. “I just want to keep making movies and I want to keep making art and I want to keep figuring my shit out,” she says. “I’m in a position right now where I’m being considered for things, which is earth-shattering to me.” She’s already shot a new film, the surreal drama Flowervale Street, with Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor playing her parents. “They were truly beyond lovely, both of them,” she says. “Ewan is the coolest that’s ever lived, and Annie has such a gentle power about her that I was so moved by.” Stella will be the one wowing newcomers some day. It’s the whole point of My Old Ass: She’s got a future.
