Emma Stone on the pressure of ‘Easy A’ role: “It was like a hurricane”
Since she first found her way onto our screens in comedies like Superbad and The House Bunny in the late 2000s, Emma Stone has become one of the most familiar faces in Hollywood. She’s taken on superhero blockbusters, won an Academy Award for her tap-dancing performance in the Hollywood love story La La Land, and most recently embarked upon a series of stranger projects with Yorgos Lanthimos.
Two decades in, she’s had a whirlwind of a career that shows no signs of slowing down. Between intense shoots and equally intense award seasons, though, there’s one film that Stone remembers finding particularly crazy. Perhaps unexpectedly, it wasn’t the strange experimentalism of Poor Things nor the worldwide sensation of Spider-Man, but the 2010 rom-com Easy A.
After a run of appearances in American comedies in the late 2000s, Stone landed a leading role in Will Gluck’s Easy A. Starring as Olive Penderghast, Stone delivered an all-time favourite rom-com performance and made Natasha Bedingfield’s ‘Pocketful of Sunshine’ all the more iconic, but she found the beloved teen film difficult to shoot behind the scenes.
Remembering the experience during a conversation with Interview Magazine, Stone suggested that she was a “wreck.” She was struggling to sleep and struggling in her personal life, making the experience less than enjoyable. “I felt a great deal of pressure making that movie,” she admitted, “because in my personal life at the time, too, things were just… It was like a hurricane.”
As the star of the movie, Stone found that there was “no place to hide.” Though she was grateful for the accountability she also found it difficult to deal with the pressure. The experience was so intense, in fact, that the actor felt like a huge weight had been lifted off her when the final “cut” was called on set.
“I remember the day I wrapped Easy A. Getting into the car as the sun was coming up because it had been a night shoot… It felt like a house had been lifted off of me,” she explained. Still, Stone hasn’t managed to go back and watch the film just yet, even though she has seen “pretty much everything else” she’s been in.
Though Stone might not be able to appreciate her performance in the film due to the hurricane-like experience behind the scenes, it remains a modern classic in the rom-com genre, one entirely elevated by her performance. Revisit Easy A below.
