“She can’t get into it”: The part in ‘Maniac’ Emma Stone gritted her teeth through
Emma Stone has starred in her fair share of strange projects, with recent success through her back-to-back collaborations with Yorgos Lanthimos on Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness. However, while some may think of this as the beginning of her foray into weirdness and wacky renaissance, the past couple of years have not been the start of this interest, with the actor starring in many surrealist and absurd projects that signified her fascination with these types of stories. In 2018, Stone starred in Maniac alongside Jonah Hill, which follows two strangers who participate in a new pharmaceutical trial that will cure them of all of their problems, which doesn’t end up going to plan.
However, despite her apparent love for this particular genre, the actor found one aspect of the show quite hard to perform and perhaps regretted her willingness to embrace the all-consuming weirdness.
Over the years, Stone has shown her love for all things unconventional and strange, with a commitment to challenging stories that can’t be immediately understood, encouraging audiences to figure out the mystery for themselves and become more involved in the art they engage with. Whether it be her recent work with Nathan Fielder on The Curse, a disorienting story about a couple trying to conceive while producing a television show for a hit cable network, or her performance in the allegorical Kinds of Kindness, she has shown a knack for articulating grey areas and darker human experiences, often creating a nihilistic mood as she hones in on some of the worst traits of humanity as a whole.
However, her 2018 project, Maniac, achieved this in a different way, with a futuristic take on pain and the way humans deal with it. It is set in a bleak and emotionless world in which you can earn money from watching ad robots and take a pill to cure your emotional ailments, with two characters agreeing to do so and journeying through a genre-bending trip that is an odyssey through the process of healing and enlightenment.
The way these themes are explored in the show required Stone to dip in and out of many different characters, with the director Cary Joji Fukunaga describing one that she was not particularly fond of. During one scene, Stone has to dress up as an elf that is made to look like a character from Lord of the Rings, with the show creator, Patrick Somerville, adding this in as a nod to Stone’s hatred of the fantasy genre.
“Just personally, that’s not her taste,” Fukunaga said. “She’s never seen Lord of the Rings; she can’t get into things that aren’t real.” The scene occurs when Stone’s character has to take a drug called ‘Confrontation’, which forces you to confront your fears and anxieties.
The director expanded on this, saying, “Patrick and I thought, well, doesn’t that make sense for the Confrontation drug? Something she really doesn’t enjoy? So we wrote that mildly into the character. And when she did the scene, she was just like [gritting his teeth] ‘Cary, I’m doing this for you!’”
Despite not being a fan of fantasies as a whole, the show’s ability to use many different genres to enhance its surrealism is what makes it stand out and highlight the mind-bending reality of the story world.
