Emma Stone: The rise and rise of the dazzling star with the arthouse urge

No one ever saw Greta Garbo urinate on screen. There are very few films in which Doris Day takes a job in a French whorehouse. Traditionally, Hollywood movie stars have been celebrated for their poise and glamour. Even when they play desperate characters – alcoholics or mental patients – they retain their sheen. You have to go to Europe to find more extreme performances, in which actors show little embarrassment about bodily functions.

That is why it’s so startling to see Emma Stone in Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’s bravura new feature Poor Things, adapted from Scottish writer Alasdair Gray’s Whitbread Award-winning novel. This is a European arthouse film, albeit one financed by a Hollywood studio (Disney-owned Searchlight). It deals very frankly with everything from incontinence to sex.

Stone, who is also a producer on the film, gives an astonishing performance as the Candide-like heroine, Bella Baxter. (She is already being strongly tipped for a second Oscar, to add to her Best Actress award for La La Land in 2017). This isn’t one of those Method-like turns in which American stars show extraordinary depths of psychological realism. Instead, it’s a highly stylised piece of acting, closer at times to what you might expect from a dancer in some Pina Bausch avant garde ballet. Stone holds nothing back. She is playing an adult who, at the start of the film, has the intellect of a child. She speaks in her own nursery rhyme language and has tantrums.

The creation of a Frankenstein-like doctor played by Willem Dafoe, Bella possesses an intense curiosity about the world. Everything is new to her. She has a voracious appetite to sample all experiences, including sex. But the more she witnesses, and the more sensations she samples, the more she learns about the chauvinism, cruelties and peculiarities of men.

“The same way [Bella] learns about language and human suffering and love and science and politics, the same way she should be equally free about sex and anything else,” Lanthimos explained during a Q&A at the recent New York Film Festival. “[Emma Stone] is just incredible… the vulnerability of [her performance] and the sensitivity and the humour of it – it’s just so difficult to do. I just don’t know how she did it.”

Stone knew what she was getting into. After all, she had worked with Lanthimos before, on the surreal 2018 period comedy The Favourite. There, her character is also put through the wringer: Abigail is the poor cousin at Queen Anne’s court. When she first arrives, she falls out of a carriage, face down into the mud, after being sexually harassed by her fellow travellers. She is a Cinderella figure, set to work as a scullery maid, doused in frozen water and forced to scrub floors before moving rapidly up the social scale.

“When we were looking for our Abigail, Yorgos was very keen to explore the possibility of working with [Stone],” Ed Guiney, producer of The Favourite and Poor Things, tells me. “He loved her energy. He is very specific in terms of his actor choices. When he spots someone and feels they’re right for the part, he lasers in on them. He was a huge fan of hers.”

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Stone wasn’t obvious casting. She was an American from Arizona playing an English gentlewoman in an 18th-century costume drama, but she carried off the role with her usual élan. Lanthimos and Stone have now made four films together: The Favourite, Poor Things; the black-and-white silent short Bleat, made in Greece and featuring a large number of goats, which showed recently at the New York Festival, and the yet-to-be-released New Orleans-set feature Kinds of Kindness (formerly known as And, which was shot at the end of last year).

When Stone first read Tony McNamara’s script for Poor Things, she was immediately intrigued. “She signed up very quickly,” Guiney says. “Such was her curiosity and passion to play the part of Bella that it expanded to all aspects of the production, [including] cast and design. She is one of those 100 per cent people. If she is into something, she is really into it.”

Poor Things, shot in late 2021 in Budapest, has graphic sex scenes and plenty of moments when Stone’s Bella, who knows no embarrassment, is put into situations that could easily have seemed humiliating or degrading. Guiney emphasises that the actor herself was involved in every aspect of the choreography of the more challenging moments.

“It’s a very, very collaborative space,” he explains. “Everything that she does has been picked over and thought about… even during the pandemic, they [Stone and Lanthimos] were running rehearsals together on Zoom. All of that stuff, she would have been part of the conversations around. There is no sense of her just doing what Yorgos asks. These are all things that they cook up together.”

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Guiney notes that Stone has also been deeply involved in the marketing and release plans for the movie. As a supporter of the ongoing Screen Actors Guild strike, she has been unable to attend press junkets but is still getting behind the movie. “Even though she hasn’t been publicly with us, she has been with us every step of the way since the film was seen at Venice,” he says. “I know she is dying to get out there and represent it. I hope that will happen soon.”

Directors speak with awe about Stone’s charisma and the headstrong way she throws herself into her roles. Woody Allen, who directed her in two back-to-back movies, Magic in the Moonlight (2014) and Irrational Man (2015), rhapsodised about her in his 2020 autobiography, Apropos of Nothing. “Put simply, Emma has it all,” he wrote. “Not only can she act but she is authentically funny and a fine dramatic actress.” He added that she is “extra charming” and claimed they “had a lot of laughs together” on set – not testimony you expect to hear about colleagues from a filmmaker generally as aloof as Allen.

Stone has often cited Diane Keaton (star of Allen’s Annie Hall) as an inspiration, and shares her exuberance, eccentricity and vulnerability in her films with Allen. In Magic in the Moonlight, she plays a medium and confidence trickster who entrances an initially sceptical Colin Firth. In Irrational Man, she is the vivacious student who has a romance with her gloomy philosophy professor (Joaquin Phoenix).

Stone was just 15 when she left her home in Scottsdale, Arizona, for Los Angeles, eager to have a crack at showbusiness. Her drive and ambition were apparent even before then. “As a student, I was a perfectionist and I really wanted to get good grades and I was very, very hard on myself,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in a 2017 podcast. “Even if I wasn’t enjoying what I was doing, I was very obsessed with getting it right.”

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At first, the young Emily Stone (she changed her screen name to Emma because someone else in the Screen Actors Guild had already taken “Emily” Stone) encountered nothing but rejection in Hollywood. She had an agent and was getting auditions but nothing came from any of them. She refused to be deterred, though, sticking it out in LA and earning a little money from an unlikely job baking special food treats for dogs. One of her earliest breaks was, unusually, on a reality show – a weekly singing competition in which she fought to star in a new version of the Seventies musical sitcom The Partridge Family. It’s startling to see her now: as she belts out a cover of Meredith Brooks’s “Bitch”, she looks like a quintessential American teenager, more Britney Spears than Gena Rowlands. “She wasn’t bad, actually,” Rolling Stone Magazine once wrote of her singing. “But she wasn’t amazing either.”

Watching the audition, you can understand why the brassy, ambitious Stone became successful. She had a husky voice, very large eyes and distinctively freckled features. Collaborators have always talked about both her charm and her energy. The first time a lot of people saw her was in the Judd Apatow-produced teen comedy Superbad (2007), being given a black eye by Jonah Hill. It was clear she was game for a laugh and had impeccable deadpan comic timing. (She has hosted Saturday Night Live and claims comedy was her first love.) Apatow was responsible for turning her into a redhead, encouraging her to dye her naturally blonde hair. She excelled opposite the living dead in apocalyptic comedy Zombieland (2009) and brought a subversive edge to her first real starring part as “the good girl who pretends to be bad” in another high-school comedy, Easy A (2010). The New York Times likened her to a new Alicia Silverstone but no one anticipated then the wildly adventurous course her career would take.

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From the outset, she has been drawn to challenging and risqué roles. It helps that she is so adaptable. She knows how to improvise. She can do musicals (triumphing on Broadway as Sally Bowles in Cabaret before starring alongside Ryan Gosling in La La Land). She has been in superhero pictures (playing Gwen Stacy opposite Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man) and was Oscar-nominated for playing Michael Keaton’s bratty yet endearing, substance-abusing daughter and assistant in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman (2014). She gave one of her best performances as the tennis star and crusading feminist Billie Jean King in Battle of the Sexes (2017). She can be demure and kindly when required, but excelled as the “born bad and a little bit mad” villainess in Cruella (2021). And Poor Things is another creative peak.

“There is huge, huge courage and commitment in what she does,” Guiney says. “As an actor, she seems to be able to free herself to go to places other actors can’t go to in terms of building a character. It’s an extraordinary gift.”

‘Poor Things’ is in cinemas from 12 January