The actor who Emma Stone wants to work with forever: “Like a Hepburn-Tracy kind of thing”
While most jobs require us to see the same people everyday, acting is a totally different ballpark. Sure, it’s not unusual for an actor to end up working with someone who they’ve previously starred alongside in another project, but in most cases, a film will see an actor working with people they’ve never acted with before, getting to know them at the same time as getting to know their character.
It’s also rare for two actors to consistently lead unrelated films together, but in some cases, certain stars come to forge such strong connections that it just works. For Emma Stone, there’s a certain actor whom she would happily work with for the rest of her career, no matter the film, having first starred opposite him in 2011. The star, known for her leading roles in movies like Easy A, La La Land, and Poor Things, to name just a few, loves the old Hollywood tradition of pairing up with another actor and gracing various movies with them – something she’d love to do with Ryan Gosling.
In the days of Old Hollywood, it was common to see a male actor and a female actor lead romantic or comedic movies opposite each other more than once, like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall or Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. If a partnership sizzled with chemistry, studios didn’t see anything wrong with profiting off this believable connection (and in many cases, the actors really did have affairs off-screen).
This isn’t something that happens as commonly these days, although, during the 1990s, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks starred in three rom-coms together – Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, and Joe Versus the Volcano, proving to be an admirable on-screen couple. Perhaps Stone and Gosling could be the next Hollywood duo to give these classic Hollywood stars a run for their money, having already appeared twice together on screen.
They first starred alongside each other in 2011’s Crazy Stupid Love, with Gosling playing Jacob, a womanizer who falls for Stone’s character, Hannah. The movie was rather well-received, although it was their next pairing in the romantic musical La La Land by Damien Chazelle which proved to be much more popular.
The pair impressed critics and audiences alike with their performances in the 2016 film, which won Stone an Oscar for ‘Best Actress’ while Gosling was nominated for ‘Best Actor’. The pair’s innate chemistry has served them well, allowing them to bring the best out of each other on-screen.
Talking to Collider, Stone revealed that when she worked with Gosling on Crazy Stupid Love, “I learned that you can meet people that you want to literally do every movie with and I met Ryan, I just think that he is amazing and I’d gladly do as many movies as they will let me with him. So it’s really fun to find a teammate in an actor, you know like a Hepburn-Tracy kind of thing. I wish.”
Hepburn and Tracy starred in nine films together, including Woman of the Year, Without Love, State of the Union, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Their collaborations spanned the early 1940s to the late 1960s, so perhaps we’ll see Stone and Gosling starring opposite each other for years to come.
