It’s not going out on a limb to say you have never seen a performance quite like Emma Stone’s in Poor Things. In this adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s novel, from New Greek Weird director, Yorgos Lanthimos, she plays Bella Baxter, an adult woman with the mind of an infant who embarks on a journey of self-discovery through fantastical Victorian-era steampunk cityscapes. It’s a tour de force of finely honed slapstick and wonky wordplay, at the service of a plausible, sincere character arc. And it’s very, very funny.
Critics have been falling over themselves in the search for superlatives. “Stone goes for bawdy, boundary-pushing broke.” “Entirely astounding.” “A hilarious, beyond-next-level performance.” More than one writer has used the word “fearless” – thinly veiled code for the sort of unabashed nudity and sexual content most Hollywood actors shy away from nowadays. The film is an Irish-British-American co-production, but the vibe is European arthouse. It will almost certainly net the actor a fourth Academy Award nomination.
“Above all, this film is the central character of Bella Baxter, this incredible creature, and she wouldn’t exist without Emma Stone, another incredible creature,” Lanthimos said while accepting the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival in September.
Fifteen years ago, who could have predicted this sort of twist in the career of a green-eyed 18-year-old who dyed her naturally blond hair red for her film debut in the gormless teen comedy Superbad? But she already had enough talent to convince you a hot chick could fall for Jonah Hill at his least alluring, which instantly gained her a big nerd following. Over the years she has fine-tuned a combination of goofy girl-next-door glamour and comic timing into an appealing screwball persona not a million miles from the likes of Irene Dunne or Carole Lombard.
She was born Emily Jean Stone in 1988, in Scottsdale, Arizona, later confessing to The Tonight Show why she changed her name: “I wanted to be called Emma because of Baby Spice.” The trademark husky voice is a result of suffering from baby colic, and she developed a “huge overbite” from sucking her thumb as a child, requiring seven years of dental braces; you can still detect the ghost of a lisp in her otherwise impeccable orthodontics. She describes herself growing up as loud and bossy, wanting to be Steve Martin or John Candy, and her chief ambition was to host Saturday Night Live. She would end up achieving her ambition five times.
She racked up a full complement of eye-catching supporting turns, including as a brainy student in The House Bunny, rocking a 1980s Madonna outfit (with dental braces) in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, and feisty love interest in the horror-comedy Zombieland. But the breakthrough was her first starring role, as Olive Penderghast in Easy A, a high-school reworking of The Scarlet Letter. Olive is slut-shamed by peers who believe (erroneously) she has lost her virginity, but exploits her notoriety to expose hypocrisy. The story is wobbly, but Stone is wholly adorable. Time magazine named it one of the 10 best performances of 2010, and praised the actor’s “gift for making sassy dialogue sound natural”.
Meanwhile, in a change of direction, she appeared in The Help as an aspiring journalist documenting racism in 1963 Mississippi by talking to African-American maids. It was a box office hit despite reducing the maids to supporting players in a white saviour narrative. Less problematic was the amiable romcom Crazy, Stupid, Love, her first collaboration with Ryan Gosling. By now everyone assumed she was a redhead, but she returned to her natural blond to play Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spider-Man, an unnecessary reboot, but enhanced by the palpable chemistry between Stone and her co-star, Andrew Garfield, with whom she was romantically involved offscreen as well as on.
Stone demonstrated her superior clothes-horse qualities in a couple of sub-par period films: slinky 1940s gowns in a second collaboration with Gosling for the undercooked Gangster Squad, and 1920s flapper gear for Woody Allen’s Magic in the Moonlight, a misfire not helped by the 28-year age gap between Stone and her leading man. “Colin Firth and I talked about the age gap, which was huge, absolutely, because he was born the same year as my dad,” she told Vulture. But she won plaudits for a raw, unfiltered, not-at-all-comedic supporting performance as Michael Keaton’s ex-junkie daughter in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Oscar-winning Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), which earned her a first Academy Award nomination.
In the winter of 2014, Stone made her Broadway debut, taking over from Michelle Williams as Sally Bowles in Cabaret. “While Stone is even less of a singer than Williams, she acts her way out of every tight spot,” said Variety. A couple of screen stumbles followed: Irrational Man, another Woody Allen flop, and, more damagingly, Cameron Crowe’s romantic comedy Aloha, set in Hawaii, in which Stone was cast as Captain Allison Ng, a character of Chinese and native Hawaiian descent. The Media Action Network for Asian Americans called the film’s whitewashing “an insult to the diverse culture and fabric of Hawaii”. When Sandra Oh quipped at the 2019 Golden Globe Awards that Crazy Rich Asians was “the first studio film with an Asian-American lead since Ghost in the Shell and Aloha”, Stone could be heard in the audience, shouting “I’m sorry!”
But this was the prelude to peak Emma Stone. First there was singing and dancing with Gosling in the rapturously received La La Land, even if her best actress Oscar was overshadowed by the gaffe in which Damien Chazelle’s bittersweet musical romance was accidentally announced as best picture in place of the real winner, Moonlight.
Stone gained 15lb of muscle to play Billie Jean King in the underrated tennis biopic Battle of the Sexes, and worked with Lanthimos for the first time in the stylised costume romp The Favourite, perfecting an English accent as the impoverished cousin and rival of Lady Marlborough (Rachel Weisz) at the court of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman). Cruella didn’t sound promising on paper, but this origin story for one of fiction’s great villainesses, set in London’s fashion world during the punk era, turned out to be a triumph for its leading actor, who invested the title character’s vengeful fury with layers of tragic longing, and modelled Jenny Beavan’s Oscar-winning costumes with swagger.
Since 2021 she has been married to, and has had a child with, Dave McCary, a director on Saturday Night Live, but has struck a smart balance between red carpet posing, not taking herself too seriously in interviews, and keeping her private life under wraps. As if moving effortlessly between comedy, arthouse and superhero pics wasn’t enough, she has extended her range into television, reuniting with her Superbad co-star Jonah Hill for the streaming series Maniac, and more recently nominated for a Golden Globe for The Curse, in which she and Nathan Fielder play a cringe-making couple filming a home improvement reality show in a New Mexico town.
What next? She has already worked with Lanthimos again in an anthology film, now in post-production, and there’s a Cruella sequel on the horizon. Poor Things will be a hard act to follow, but if her superbly nuanced performance in The Curse is anything to go by, she’ll be taking it in her stride.
