“Is it never going to be my time?”: The rejection that made Emma Stone question her career
It’s now almost laughable that Emma Stone ever questioned her future success.
There might be an active debate on whether Timothée Chalamet, Michael B Jordan, Austin Butler, or Jacob Elordi will be the definitive male movie stars of their generation, but there is no debate on who their female counterpart is, with Emma Stone so ahead of her competition that she seems to break records with every new project.
Stone already has two Academy Award wins for La La Land and Poor Things, respectively, both of which were major box office hits, despite being in less popular genres. In addition to the other nominations she has received for Birdman (or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), The Favourite, and most recently for Bugonia, she also has a slew of acclaimed television projects, including Maniac and The Curse.
Stone’s success isn’t just a sign of her brilliance and commitment, but of her longevity, having attended auditions from when she was very young, and she also sought out many roles that she didn’t end up getting, citing a close call for the television series Heroes as being one of her most memorable rejections.
“Heroes was tough was because I could hear them through the wall telling Hayden Panettiere, ‘You got the part, you’re the best’,” she said, “Then I went in right after her. I was like, ‘Fuck, man! Is it never going to be my time?’ And then two weeks later, I got Superbad, my first movie, and that changed my entire life.”
Stone and Panettiere had both auditioned for the role of Claire Bennett, a high school teenager who discovers that she has superpowers, and at the time of its debut, the NBC superhero drama seemed like it could be the heir-apparent to Lost, as it drew in record-breaking viewership and was treated as a phenomenon.
Although Stone may have been devastated at the time, losing out on Heroes was the best thing that could have happened to her, as the series is now remembered as one of the most memorable cases in which a show lost steam after a great first season; the backlash to later seasons of Heroes was so significant that it was cancelled at the end of its fourth year on the air.
Not only would Heroes have been a mixed bag for her career in terms of quality, but it would have prevented her from auditioning for other roles because of the intensive shooting schedule of filming a season with 23 episodes. It was shortly after nailing her small part in Superbad that the actor became a bona fide comedy star with her roles in Zombieland, Easy A, Friends With Benefits, and Crazy, Stupid, Love.
One of the reasons that Heroes was considered to be so significant was that it came at a time when the superhero genre was experiencing a resurgence in dominance. However, that was something that Stone also managed to be part of when she was cast to play Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spider-Man and its sequel, and although its legacy has been rather divisive, given that the franchise was cancelled so that the character could be added to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the chemistry between Stone and Andrew Garfield was universally hailed as a perfect representation of the characters’ dynamic in Stan Lee’s original comic books.
