The role that reignited Emma Stone’s passion for acting: “Oh my god, this is why I do it”
Self-doubt is a ferocious monster that digs its claws into the best of us, even established actors who have all of Hollywood at their fingertips, so while Emma Stone might have won two Oscars, with every role she undertakes receiving unanimous praise, there was a time when she worried too much about what people thought about her.
It’s so normal to get these creeping feelings, especially when you have a job that puts you in the public eye, and what’s more public than being a Hollywood star, which brings with it the worry of what people are saying about you and whether you actually have what it takes to fulfil people’s expectations. Sure, this spiral can surely take its toll, but Stone soon found a way to squash the chatter that was circulating around the back of her mind.
“I was letting a lot of outside opinion permeate me. I thought I needed to do certain things or be a certain way,” she told Backstage. It turns out she just needed to find a role that allowed her to stop questioning her abilities, one that she could completely throw herself into and never look back, and that proved to be Cabaret.
Stone made her Broadway debut in the role of Sally Bowles in 2014, a part she had wanted to play since she was a kid, noting, “I saw Cabaret when I was young, and I was so in love with that”, revealing that she told director Rob Marshall, “how much I wanted to be Sally”.
With Marshall having worked on a 1998 version of it with Sam Mendes, the pair regrouped for another production of the musical 16 years later, although it was initially Michelle Williams who was going to play the iconic role. When she had to step down, Stone became her replacement, and this proved to be a defining moment in her career that helped push her to the next stage of her tenure as an actor. She perhaps may not have been the Oscar-winning icon today if she hadn’t dedicated herself so fully to Cabaret, which reminded her why she loves acting so much in the first place.
“Getting to do this thing that I never really thought I would have the opportunity to do was like, ‘Oh my God, this is why I do it. This is what it’s all about’. It really reinvigorated something,” Stone explained. “I started understanding, in a real way, it’s not about the outside-in, it really is about the inside-out. You realise that you have to love what you do more than you love what people say about what you do”.
To date, Cabaret is the only time the actor has appeared on stage, but what a role to have as your only credit (so far, at least) as such. With stars ranging from Judi Dench to Liza Minnelli taking on the mantel over the years, the character of Sally is one of theatre’s most coveted, conceived by Christopher Isherwood, who placed her in his novel Goodbye to Berlin, inspiring the play I Am a Camera and eventually the musical version, Cabaret.
Her’s is such an enduring story because of the merging of the political and the personal, as Sally tries to make it as a star in Weimar-era Germany while the rise of the Nazis lingers in the background. Her talents aren’t astounding, but she wants to be big so bad, and it’s her drive to become a famous singer that propels her story, which is clearly something that resonated with the then self-doubting Stone, because her performance as Sally really brought her back to life.
