Emma Stone names the greatest role she’ll ever play: “Sign me up”
There are few actors that have had such an impressive run of films as Emma Stone, with a string of stories from the mind-bending world of Yorgos Lanthimos that has established the pair as one of cinema’s greatest collaborative forces.
Before this point, Stone had already honed a captivating screen presence, with films like La La Land, Birdman and The Amazing Spider-Man setting her apart as one of the most talented performers of our time. Despite the magnitude of these roles, Stone has named one project as the greatest opportunity of her career, reflecting on the impact that it has had on not only her career but her personal life too.
Stone first worked with Lanthimos in 2018 for The Favourite, starring alongside Olivia Colman and Rachel Weisz in the outrageous tale of deceit and rivalry in early 18th-century England. It is a delightfully odd and jarring film about the quest to be somebody’s favourite, all shown through Lanthimos’ signature deadpan humour and disorientating visual style.
And it was after production had wrapped that the director approached Stone about another project he wanted to make: the story of Bella Baxter, a woman with a baby of a brain who begins to discover herself and the world around her. We now know how this story ended, and after the film was released this year, Stone won her second Academy Award for her performance.
Poor Things is both comedic and profound, with Bella Baxter embarking on an odyssey of self-awareness and discovery, becoming sentient through her acquisition of knowledge about the political landscape of the world, her sexual awakening and understanding of inequality. Many of the men around her seek to exploit her child-like qualities, wanting to own somebody that they believe will be easy to control, but as she continues on her journey of enlightenment, they realize that this will not be the case.
It’s an extremely challenging role to approach, and when asked about the initial discussions had about the film, Stone said, “He [Lanthimos] gave me sort of the brass-tacks overview of Bella, what she goes through and what the men in her life experience as a response to how she’s evolving. And I was just like, ‘Sign me up’. My God, she’s the greatest character I’ll probably ever get to play”.
There was an endless amount of material in Poor Things for Stone to sink her teeth into, with countless layers and contradictions within the work that prompted it to become quite the source of debate after its release. When asked about her working relationship with Lanthimos and how they realised the story on set, Stone said, “I obviously have full-blown, very intense trust in him and as an actor, it’s the best feeling ever, because it’s so rare that you feel like whatever you do, you’re protected by your director.”
The sense of trust and openness between the pair is very tangible, as the duo have since worked on Kinds of Kindness and are now shooting their next film Bugonia, showing a relentless sense of curiosity and love for the medium that means when one project ends, they jump straight onto the next one.
