Emma Stone reveals the worst career advice she was ever given: “Total garbage”
There is no shortage of offensive, useless and downright sexist advice that most female actors have received over the years. After all, Hollywood isn’t exactly a safe haven for women, given the years of misogynistic abuse constantly coming to light.
For Emma Stone, the sexist character of the film industry revealed itself early on through the ‘sage’ advice of an executive.
Currently one of the most successful and sought-after actors in the business, Stone received the 2024 Palm Springs International Film Awards’ Desert Palm Achievement Award for her performance in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things. During her acceptance speech, she worked in a little gotcha moment for the sexist executives who didn’t see longevity in her career.
“When I first moved to LA, I went to one of those general meetings that they sometimes send you to, and an executive told me that for male actors, it’s a marathon, not a sprint,” she explained, “And in his eyes, for women, it was a sprint, not a marathon. And that was 20 years ago.”
Now, smugly 21 years into her career, Stone shows absolutely no signs of slowing down; if anything, she’s sped up in the past few years.
In a sustained attempt at longevity, the actor has gone through a career arc quite unlike many others in Hollywood. She’s moved from her breakout roles in Superbad and Zombieland to being typecast as a sensitive, doe-eyed dramatist and onto being a powerhouse at the forefront of the weird and wonderful, working with directors like Lanthimos and Ari Aster. It’s honestly exciting to consider where her career will take her next.
But she’s far from the only female actor who has made a lifelong career in the movie business. Women in any industry, especially one under such public scrutiny, are told that youth and beauty are their power. This limited resource will dwindle with age until they have to fight for the scraps or marry a talented and rich husband to pick up the pieces.
As with many things, women continue to prove sexist presumptions wrong, just as Stone went on to point out, “And I realise that advice is total garbage because the majority of the women that I look up to in this industry have proven that as time goes on, life and work only get more interesting and more fulfilling.”
Actors like Demi Moore, Pamela Anderson and Jamie Lee Curtis, just to name a very small few, are currently proving that ageing can be expansive.
For them, it has opened new doors, provided nuanced and complex roles and taken them to creative heights they might not have considered as younger women first stepping into their careers. They continue to astound us, and undoubtedly, Stone will too. But that’s not to say it’s an easy road.
It isn’t just a marathon for women, but a hurdling one. The aforementioned actors have had to fight twice as hard as their male counterparts for those roles, for recognition, and for equal pay, and that’s not even to speak of female actors of colour for whom there’s an added layer of difficulty. For actors like Viola Davis and Angela Bassett, it’s probably been more like Takeshi’s Castle than a straightforward race. But all of them continue to prove that youth and beauty are not the only tools at women’s disposal.
