The “butchered” 2016 Emma Stone performance you’ll never see: “I want another chance”
Despite being one of the biggest names in Hollywood, Emma Stone had a rather unique journey through fame, initially fancying herself as a sketch comedy performer before realising that acting had everything she’d ever wanted in a career path.
“I think I connected with being able to bring to life what I wanted to more with acting,” Stone once explained. “Performing helped me as a kid to channel my energy somewhere else, to put it out instead of turning it inward. Acting is therapy, especially as a kid; it was nice to have an outlet like that when I was really struggling with panic attacks.”
Like many of her peers, Stone climbed to the top not only because she had a genuine love for the art form but also because she understood how the most beautiful art often came from understanding how to channel her own emotions… And while she also gained a significant amount of popularity from her comedic stints, people also recognised early on that she had more range than most who had been in the game for far longer.
After all, most people remember how great she was in films like Superbad, Easy A, and Zombieland, but it was also her roles in films like The Help, Birdman, and La La Land that proved that she really could conquer anything and do it with the kind of emotional nuance required to make not only her characters feel like real people but also the stories they were in feel authentic and like they were worlds built personally for us, the viewer.
Take the more recent Poor Things as another example. Yes, this film is complicated when you attempt to venture deeper into its meaning and the countless possible interpretations of its broader themes, but Stone’s Bella Baxter also carries a lot of the same thoughts and emotions many of us can relate to, like trying to find your place in the world and attempting to understand the people in it.
Perhaps, then, it’s Stone’s unique ability to relate to even the most outlandish of characters and scenarios that makes her one of the most reputable and sought-after actors. After all, most people would have likely been given the script to Poor Things and immediately tossed it aside for something more conventionally Hollywood, and yet, Stone gave it her all, delivering a performance that further cemented her place in film history.
Therefore, she has something many people don’t, and is able to see magic in things that aren’t always immediately obvious. A scrapped Saturday Night Live skit that she co-created with writer-comedian Julio Torres, for instance, also proved all the reasons why she understands just as well why comedy almost always succeeds when there’s a deeper, emotional underlayer.
The sketch itself centred around an overly empathetic ‘Silver Woman’ who slowly has a breakdown over the course of a dinner party, driven to insanity by the empathy she feels towards her own cutlery. During the dinner, she can physically hear the silverware screaming while people are eating, hearing the pain and suffering that the others are completely oblivious to.
Discussing the sketch with Torres for A24, Stone recalled “being in love with the idea” but feeling bad about completely blowing it during the table read. “You have to believe it with your whole heart, and it has to be life or death,” she said, concluding, “And I was like, OK. So I was wrapping my mind around this, and I felt like I completely butchered it, and that’s why we didn’t get to do it. And I hope that one day we can go back and do it again.”
