Practice saying this with me: “Two-time Academy Award winner, Emma Stone.” That’s how good the La La Land star is in her newest feature, Poor Things – one of Stone’s best movies, and the next collaboration with The Favourite director Yorgos Lanthimos. Having made the fall film festival circuit, Poor Things is starting to screen for audiences, riding on a wave of critical support for Lanthimos’s unique vision. And as was pointed out in CinemaBlend’s official Poor Things review, the movie soars on the performance of Stone as Bella Baxter, a woman potentially “created” in a lab by the inquisitive Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) and then unleashed on the world.
There are parallels in Bella’s story to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Only, Poor Things asks, ‘What if Frankenstein’s monster discovered her own sexuality, and became obsessed with what she properly labels “happy when she want!”’ The journey that follows is very sex-positive, and very much in line with the pitch-black comedy that Lanthimos brought to his earlier films, both with Emma Stone (The Favourite) and without her (The Lobster, Dogtooth).
There’s a confidence, and a fearlessness, in Stone’s performance that we assume can only come with familiarity in a director partner. And when both Stone and Lanthimos appeared as guests on CinemaBlend’s official ReelBlend podcast, we asked her if she could have done Poor Things with a filmmaker she didn’t know. And she explained:
I don't think (so). I mean, maybe if it was you? (She turns to Lanthimos and laughs) I guess maybe if we hadn't made The Favourite before we made this one. I guess yes. Other than that, no. … I wouldn't have wanted to. I mean, the combination, I think, of those factors. Like, I love Bella so deeply, and this story so deeply. But then also, it’s him and his work. Yorgos, and his work. So I think that all of those elements coming together is what made me want to do this so, so badly.
Their risk is our reward. Poor Things is, in my opinion, the best Yorgos Lanthimos movie to date. And Stone’s fearless, commanding performance as Bella rivals anything she has done, including her Oscar-winning work in Damien Chazelle’s brilliant musical. There is so much brazen confidence woven into every performance throughout Poor Things – from Stone and Dafoe to Mark Ruffalo, Ramy Youssef, and Margaret Qualley – that it’s wild to hear the stars had trepidation over the work that they were doing. In recent interviews, Ruffalo has been admitting to questioning whether or not he even was right for the part. With Lanthimos telling ReelBlend:
Everybody has doubts. And Mark was… he'd never done anything like it. Of course he was hesitating. But I could see that he really appreciated the material, and deep down he really wanted to do it. He was just scared. And that’s the best reason to do something, and to expect that something interesting might come out. So I just encouraged him.
As did Stone, who admitted to ReelBlend that she shared the nerves and trepidation, even though she never let the uncertainty bubble up into fear. She said:
I don't know that fear is the right word. It's more kind of like vulnerability, or wanting to live up to it. Caring so deeply about this character, and this film. I want to do it justice. And so I guess that's fear, but it's kind of not? It's more just being hard on myself.
‘That’s What I Sound Like?’
Poor Things continues to expand Emma Stone’s reach as a producer, a credit she earned on the Walt Disney feature Cruella (in which she starred) and the films Problemista and When You Finish Saving The World. After decades of honing her craft, and succeeding at the highest levels, Stone seems ready to challenge herself in roles that go against her grain. In the psychological black comedy Maniac, for example, she embarked on a hallucinatory journey by playing someone agreeing to a risky pharmaceutical trial. And she’s currently pushing the comedic envelope alongside The Rehearsal’s Nathan Fielder in the new television show, The Curse.
At times, those projects still asked Stone to reach into her bag of tricks: Her deft comedic timing, and her physically expressive reactions. Those are stripped away when she’s asked to play Bella, a simple woman who’s almost re-learning how to live. With that in mind, Stone jokingly told ReelBlend that preparing to play Bella almost was counterproductive.
As she explained:
I don’t prepare. (laughs) Why prepare? Just figure it out on the day! (laughs) The preparation for something like this was, we worked on some physicality, Yorgos and I together. And the stages (of Bella’s development). I learned my lines. And that's kind of it. … It was mostly in chronological order. But at the very beginning, at Baxter's house, we had to shoot stage one, the very beginning, and stage five, the very end of the film. Without having shot her development in the middle. So that, the actual practical physicality of that, we worked on a bit. But (even) that would still change on the day.
Improvising too much might have made things difficult, as Bella’s journey through the Poor Things world is somewhat preordained. During the story, this inquisitive creature decides to leave her father “God’s” laboratory and go on an adventure with the self-absorbed Duncan Wedderburn (Ruffalo). Their trip takes them through Lisbon and Paris, where Bella’s eyes are open to the delicacies – and decadence – of the world. Some of Stone’s finest actions in Poor Things are reactions. To bad food. To dancing. To alcohol. And of course, to sex, which Bella calls “furious jumping.”
It’s unlike anything we have seen Stone in before. To a certain extent, it’s unlike anything she has seen herself in before. She told ReelBlend:
Everything coming together, seeing it is always kind of startling, or reveals things. The editing in general, performance wise, all of it is a different interpretation of the character than what is going on within your own body. I mean, it's like hearing your voice back on a voicemail, you know? And you're like, ‘That's what I sound like?’
‘The Language Becomes a Little Bit More Specific’
It helps that in addition to Stone, Dafoe, and Ruffalo’s off-kilter performances, they’re immersed in a surrealist world that gets filtered through the unique eye of Yorgos Lanthimos. Massive, ornate sets stand in for a cruise ship that Duncan takes Bella on, or the cities of Lisbon and Paris, which appear to borrow a little from the intricate imagination of Wes Anderson, though undoubtedly shaped to the mold of Lanthimos.
He told ReelBlend that it took a while, and a lot of experimentation, to arrive on the look he wanted for Poor Things. Said Lanthimos:
What we try to do is, just before we start, (we) build some kind of a language and a toolkit, and say, ‘We're going to use these tools.’ We test a lot, and we look at things and see how it fits into the world that we're building. And then we have these tools. And when the time comes, on the day, we rehearse with the actors and then start thinking of what the best way would be to film the particular scene. And I think there's a learning curve. So maybe in the beginning, we shoot more stuff to have more options when we don't really know exactly what we're doing. Not that we ever do (laughs), but it becomes a little bit more familiar, and the language becomes a little bit more specific.
These two will continue to speak the same language. After The Favourite and Poor Things, they revealed to ReelBlend that they’ve already shot a third movie together, with cinematographer Robbie Ryan. It’s titled Kind of Kindness, and co-stars Hunter Schafer, Hong Chau, Jesse Plemons, Dafoe, Qualley, and Stone. It’s tabbed as an upcoming 2024 movie, though details are under wraps.
For now, the focus remains on Poor Things, which audiences are seeing, and even stepping into thanks to interactive events. Here’s the complete conversation between ReelBlend, Emma Stone, and Yorgos Lanthimos.
See Poor Things, which is running in limited release, and expanding in the coming weeks and months.
