The one role Emma Stone wishes she could play forever: “She’s incredible”
Stories emerge all the time about actors having a hard time saying goodbye, because after playing a role for so long, or playing such a beloved or intensive role, the idea of separating and letting it go becomes almost unfathomable, and even after the painful split, Emma Stone still mourns one goodbye.
A lot of the time, these stories come about after projects where an actor has gone completely and utterly all in, like Jim Carrey, who, when he played Andy Kaufman, lost himself in the role. “I didn’t know who I was anymore when the movie was over. I didn’t know what my politics were. I couldn’t remember what I was about,” he said as the job took over everything.
For performers who method act, ‘everything’ is exactly what is demanded by a project. But even for people who don’t, the necessary split that comes with the final cut can be excruciating. “I felt like I’d left [Dani] in that field in that state. I definitely felt like I’d left her there in that field to be abused,” Florence Pugh once said about the end of Midsommar, where leaving her character came along with incredible guilt, showing a darker side of having to leave behind a character that maybe didn’t get a happy ending.
For Emma Stone, having been in so many movies by now, she should be used to the feeling. Perhaps she’d had the benefit of most of those roles simply being normal people, normal girls who she could easily dip in and out of or even take pieces of them with her without feeling like she was descending into madness. But it was when she played her most challenging role yet that she found the goodbye the most difficult, but in her case, it was simply because she loved her so much.
“If I could have a chance to play Bella again forevermore, I would,” Stone told W Magazine, talking about her ongoing and seemingly unending love for her own character, Bella Baxter, in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things. It’s a love that even the director himself seems baffled by, as Stone joked, “I mean, even Yorgos is like, ‘We get it, you miss Bella. Get over it. Grow up.’”
There was just something about that character. Stone never made any secret of her complete and utter adoration for that project. Even as the movie was being released, Stone’s love for it went far beyond a contractual obligation to promote it. It was clear from the start that she was obsessed.
“She’s my favourite character ever, like hands down, by a mile – she’s incredible,” Stone told The Irish Examiner. “I know that I probably will never ever get to even touch a character like Bella ever again, which is heartbreaking to me, but also incredible because to be so lucky to get to play a character like her.”
It would be easy to be cynical and try to claim that Stone’s love for Bella simply comes down to the fact that it was a role that brought her incredible success and was a true vehicle to show the extent of her talent that had never been appreciated before. But really, it all just comes down to Stone’s personal feelings towards the person she was playing, and how free playing a figure like Bella made her feel.
“Bella is precious to me,” she said in an understatement, unable to adequately capture how special that character was.
