The Story Behind Justin Bieber's Team Getting Involved In My Old Ass' Hilarious Mushroom Trip Scene: 'It's A Love Letter To Him'
Maisy Stella reacts to singing "One Less Lonely Girl."
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:
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:
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:
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.
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Sarah El-Mahmoud has been with CinemaBlend since 2018 after graduating from Cal State Fullerton with a degree in Journalism. In college, she was the Managing Editor of the award-winning college paper, The Daily Titan, where she specialized in writing/editing long-form features, profiles and arts & entertainment coverage, including her first run-in with movie reporting, with a phone interview with Guillermo del Toro for Best Picture winner, The Shape of Water. Now she's into covering YA television and movies, and plenty of horror. Word webslinger. All her writing should be read in Sarah Connor’s Terminator 2 voice over.