It’s no exaggeration to say you’ve never seen a performance like Emma Stone’s in Poor Things. In this adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s novel, from New Greek Weird director Yorgos Lanthimos, she plays Bella Baxter, a grown woman with the mind of a child who embarks on a journey of self-discovery through fantastical Victorian-era steampunk cityscapes. It’s a tour de force of finely honed slapstick and wonky puns in service of a plausible, heartfelt character arc. And it’s very, very funny.
Critics have fallen over themselves in their search for superlatives. “Stone goes for bawdy, borderline vomit.” “Completely amazing.” “A hilarious performance that goes beyond the next level.” More than one writer has used the word “fearless” – thinly veiled code for the kind of unapologetic nudity and sexual content that most Hollywood actors shy away from these days. The film is an Irish-British-American co-production, but the atmosphere is European arthouse. It will almost certainly earn the actor a fourth Academy Award nomination.
“Above all, this film is the central character of Bella Baxter, this incredible being, and she would not exist without Emma Stone, another incredible being,” said Lanthimos as he accepted the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in September.
Who could have predicted such a turn fifteen years ago in the career of a green-eyed eighteen-year-old who dyed her naturally blonde hair red for her film debut in the gormless teen comedy Superbad? But she already had enough talent to convince you that a hot girl could fall in love with Jonah Hill in the least seductive way, which immediately earned her a large nerd following. Over the years, she’s refined a combination of crazy girl-next-door glamor and comedic timing into an appealing character who isn’t a million miles away from Irene Dunne or Carole Lombard.
She was born Emily Jean Stone in 1988 in Scottsdale, Arizona, and later confessed to The Tonight Show why she changed her name: “I wanted to be called Emma because of Baby Spice.” The distinctive hoarse voice is a result of suffering from infant colic, and she developed a “massive overbite” from sucking her thumb as a child, which required a brace for seven years; you can still detect the ghost of a lisp in her otherwise impeccable orthodontics. She describes herself as loud and bossy, she wanted to be Steve Martin or John Candy, and her main ambition was to host Saturday Night Live. Ultimately, she would achieve her ambition five times over.
She achieved a slew of notable supporting turns, including as a smart student in The House Bunny, rocking an ’80s Madonna outfit (with braces) in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, and a feisty love interest in the horror-comedy Zombieland. But the breakout role was her first leading role, as Olive Penderghast in Easy A, a high school reworking of The Scarlet Letter. Olive is slut-shamed by peers who (wrongly) believe she has lost her virginity, but abuses her fame to expose hypocrisy. The story is wobbly, but Stone is downright adorable. Time Magazine named it one of the 10 best performances of 2010, praising the actor’s “gift for making sassy dialogue sound natural.”
Meanwhile, in a different vein, she appeared in The Help as an aspiring journalist who documented racism in 1963 Mississippi by talking to African-American maids. It was a box office hit, despite the maids being reduced to supporting players in a white savior story. Less problematic was the sympathetic romcom Crazy, Stupid, Love, her first collaboration with Ryan Gosling. By now everyone assumed she was a redhead, but she returned to her natural blonde to play Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spider-Man, an unnecessary reboot but enhanced by the palpable chemistry between Stone and her co-star, Andrew Garfield, with whom she was romantically involved both off-screen and on-screen.
Stone demonstrated her superior draft-horse qualities in a number of subpar films: slinky 1940s gowns in a second collaboration with Gosling for the undercooked Gangster Squad, and 1920s flapper gear for Woody Allen’s Magic in the Moonlight, a failure that was not helped due to the 28-year age difference between Stone and her leading man. “Colin Firth and I talked about the age difference, which was absolutely huge because he was born the same year as my dad,” she told Vulture. But she won critical acclaim for her raw, unfiltered, not-at-all-comic supporting role as Michael Keaton’s ex-junkie daughter in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Oscar-winning Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), which earned her her first Academy Award. lecture.
In the winter of 2014, Stone made her Broadway debut, taking over the role from Michelle Williams as Sally Bowles in Cabaret. “Although Stone is even less of a singer than Williams, she knows how to get out of any tight situation,” according to Variety. A few on-screen stumbles followed: Irrational Man, another Woody Allen flop, and, even more damaging, Cameron Crowe’s romantic comedy Aloha, set in Hawaii, in which Stone was cast as Captain Allison Ng, a character of Chinese and native descent. Hawaiian ancestry. The Media Action Network for Asian American called the film’s whitewashing “an insult to Hawaii’s diverse culture and fabric.” When Sandra Oh joked at the 2019 Golden Globe Awards that Crazy Rich Asians was “the first studio film with an Asian-American lead since Ghost in the Shell and Aloha,” Stone could be heard in the audience shouting, “I’m sorry! ”
But this was the prelude to Emma Stone’s climax. First there was singing and dancing with Gosling in the rapturously received La La Land, even though her Best Actress Oscar was overshadowed by the blunder in which Damien Chazelle’s bittersweet musical romance was accidentally announced as Best Picture instead of the real winner, Moonlight .
Stone gained 15 pounds of muscle to play Billie Jean King in the underrated tennis biopic Battle of the Sexes, and first worked with Lanthimos in the stylized costume part The Favorite, perfecting an English accent as Lady Marlborough’s impoverished cousin and rival. Rachel Weisz) at the court of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman). Cruella didn’t sound promising on paper, but this origin story of one of fiction’s greatest villains, set in London’s fashion world during the punk era, proved to be a triumph for its protagonist, who layered the title character’s vengeful rage . of tragic longing, and modeled Jenny Beavan’s Oscar-winning costumes with swagger.
As of 2021, she’s married and has a child with Saturday Night Live director Dave McCary, but she’s found a smart balance between posing on the red carpet, not taking herself too seriously in interviews, and keeping her private life in check to hold. wrappers. As if switching effortlessly between comedy, arthouse, and superhero pics wasn’t enough, she’s expanded her range into television, reuniting with her Superbad co-star Jonah Hill for the streaming series Maniac, and most recently nominated for a Golden Globe for The Curse. , in which she and Nathan Fielder play a cringe-inducing couple filming a home improvement reality show in a New Mexico town.
What now? She’s already teamed up with Lanthimos again in an anthology film, now in post-production, and there’s a Cruella sequel on the horizon. Poor Things will be a tough act to follow, but if her exceptionally nuanced performance in The Curse is to be believed, she’ll do it with ease.