If you’ve seen My Old Ass, which is new on streaming this week for those with an Amazon Prime Video subscription, you know it’s one of the most endearing movies of the year. I don’t know about you, but I’m still not over the fact that in the movie, Maisy Stella’s Elliott has a mushroom trip where she breaks into song to serenade Justin Bieber to her crush. When CinemaBlend spoke to the movie’s star, she clearly still wasn’t over it either. Stella and writer/director Megan Park broke down how the scene became part of the movie.
Early into the film, Elliott and her friends go out to the Muskoka woods on her 18th birthday to indulge in a mushroom trip. It appears to conjure Elliott’s 39-year-old self (played by Aubrey Plaza), who cautions her to stay away from a guy named Chad, whom she meets not long after their conversation. As Elliott starts to find herself crushing hard on Chad without a red flag in sight, she decides to try the mushrooms again in hopes of talking to her older self again. But this time, the trip has the teen living her nine-year-old Justin Bieber fantasy, leading into an unexpected music number in the movie. Park said this about how Justin Bieber was involved:
I mean, listen, I don’t know, his team approved the usage of that song and the whole thing and yeah, we had to get his team’s sign off and they did. He’s a Toronto kid though. He’s been spotted up in Muskoka, so we hope that he saw it and loved it.
The song she’s talking about is Justin Bieber’s 2009 track “One Less Lonely Girl” off his debut album the singer released when he was just 15 years old. In My Old Ass, we learn that while all the other girls wanted to be the subject of the song, Elliott had hopes to be Bieber, who would regularly invite fans up to serenade the song to and offer flowers to. While Megan Park or Maisy Stella don’t know for sure whether JB watched the scene himself, they did have to get approval from his team, which makes it a high possibility. As Stella shared:
A weird, weird thing that would be for me. I feel like, because the reason that’s in the movie is because it was so significant for me as a child, that ‘One Less Lonely Girl’ was like really formative for me. And,so, it would just be very full circle for him to have actually seen it. It’s such a love letter and I just would hope that – I think that I had the swag that he has, you know?
It sounds like My Old Ass actually drew from Maisy Stella’s own fantasies to deliver the funniest scene in the movie that tons of girls who drew up Beliebers can certainly relate to. Stella also said this:
I just hope he would approve. That’s all, that’s all I want is his stamp of approval. That’s all I’ve ever wanted in everything is Justin Bieber’s stamp of approval.
Ah, if we could only hear Justin Bieber’s reaction! In between Stella’s words (in the video above), Megan Park said the scene is a “love letter” to the singer, along with assuring Stella that she had “some swag” and she thinks Bieber would approve. It’s an amazing rendition of an early hit of his, and I’m sure the pop star, who just became a new dad, would get a kick out of it!
Elsewhere in my interview with Maisy Stella and Megan Park, they talked about working with Margot Robbie as a producer and flipping the script with the movie’s unique coming out scene. You can stream My Old Ass on Amazon Prime now.
