Reintroducing Maisy Stella

If you thought high school was hard enough, put yourself in Maisy Stella’s shoes. When she was 14, her whole life turned upside down in the span of three months. First, Nashville — the country-music drama she’d “been on since before I gained consciousness” — ended after six seasons. Then her older sister, Lennon, who was also her co-star and bandmate, moved out to begin adult life on her own. Meanwhile, their parents were splitting up. “All of a sudden, it was just me and my mom in the house,” says Stella, now 20.

To cope, she went full normcore. “I had romanticized having a backpack and going to school and having a locker,” she says. “I was so obsessed with Girl Meets World, Boy Meets World, those shows that were just about kids at school. I wanted to experience it so badly — and then I did.”

She made non-showbiz friends. She went to prom. She played guitar and wrote songs just for fun. She was still auditioning regularly, but she wasn’t booking any roles — a source of frustration at the time, she says, but “the greatest gift” in retrospect. “I didn’t have real obligations for the first time. I made sure my head was screwed on and really just played and explored.”

For her reintroduction to Hollywood, Stella couldn’t have asked for a better movie than My Old Ass. It’s a coming-of-age comedy about a rising college freshman who gets high on mushrooms, meets the 39-year-old version of herself (played by Aubrey Plaza), and starts pondering the different directions her life could take. “I have been such a fan of hers forever,” she says of Plaza. “Getting to be in a movie with her, much less literally playing her baby self, I would imagine will be one of the coolest things I’ll ever do.”

When Stella watched the final cut, it was Plaza’s performance as a jaded adult trying to recapture a youthful spark that moved her the most. “I’ve never watched it without crying,” she says, quickly clarifying: “She’s making me cry. Just want to make that clear. I’m not crying at my own performance.”

“A lot of child actors don’t get that experience of feeling protected and safe, and I really did.”

Stella is a big believer in putting things out into the universe — “I have my manifestation books, and I’ll go back to the pages like, ‘Holy shit, all of these things have happened!” — and she’d had director Megan Park on her list of dream collaborators ever since she auditioned for Park’s first movie, The Fallout. She ultimately wasn’t cast in that one, but the two stayed in touch, and Stella even contributed a song to The Fallout’s soundtrack. “I was actively speaking into existence that I got to do a movie with her,” Stella says.

Once Stella was cast in My Old Ass, Park tweaked the script to bring more of Stella into the protagonist: a stubborn, vivacious teenager named Elliott who’s grappling with first loves and the weight of becoming an adult. Over the course of the film, Elliott also realizes she doesn’t fit so neatly into her self-identified label of being gay — something Stella, who says she’s currently in a queer relationship, was happy to see explored on-screen.

“I grew up not being forced to label, which is not everyone’s experience,” says Stella, who’s originally from Ontario, Canada. In Nashville, where her family moved for the show, she came to understand the pressure many young people feel to identify a certain way. “I didn’t know anyone cared, and that changed my experience with myself a little bit,” she says. “I’ve always just kind of allowed myself to be.”

In conversation, Stella has the gravitas and self-awareness of someone much older. She sometimes dips into the therapy-speak native to child stars who’ve spent above-average time processing their upbringing. (“Music sits in a very special place in my body,” she tells me at one point.) But at a moment when the demands of child actors are being discussed more openly than ever, Stella has no complaints. Her standout memories of the Nashville era are happy ones — like performing for Taylor Swift at the 2013 Country Music Awards when she was just 9 years old. “It was such a sweet interaction that I almost hope that we never have another one,” she says, “because in my head it’s so perfect.”

“I grew up not being forced to label [myself]. I’ve always just kind of allowed myself to be.”

She credits Lennon, who is five years older, with being “the protector” on set. “Lennon kept the right things from me, didn’t tell me certain things in protection of my mental health. She was a huge part of why it worked so well for me,” Stella says. “I had so much fun doing [the show]. A lot of child actors don’t get that experience of feeling protected and safe, and I really did.”

Before she starts a new page in her manifestation journal, Stella always does a gratitude exercise. “This sounds so cringe,” she says, “but I really think if you’re just writing things and making stuff up and you don’t actually feel it, I don’t think the things that you manifest will come.” At 20 years old, she’s already lived more lives than most people her age. My Old Ass has given her new appreciation for all of it — the glamorous and the ordinary. “I get to actively live and love my people and do my best before I have to look back like ‘I wish I did this and this,’” she says. “I felt so grateful to have gotten that lesson at 18, that gift of feeling like ‘I get to do it before it’s too late.’”