“I seek outings and adventures,” says Bella Baxter, a long-limbed Frankenstein creation with ink-black eyebrows and matching thigh-length hair, describing herself as an “experimenting person”.
The same could be said for Emma Stone, who on Sunday won a Golden Globe for playing the bizarre protagonist in Poor Things, the latest film by Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos. Now widely tipped for an Oscar, she also helped to produce the film, which was adapted from the 1992 novel by the late Scottish author Alasdair Gray.
Bella is a cadaver revived by scientist Dr Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) who implants the brain of her unborn baby into her skull. Pre-verbal, she urinates on the floor and moves like a marionette, until her mind matures, along with her appetites. Abandoning the monochrome claustrophobia of Victorian London for brilliant adventures in Europe, she gorges on custard tarts, dancing and champagne in what the film’s writer, Tony McNamara, has described as the “dystopian version of a Merchant Ivory . . . grand tour”.
Ed Guiney, one of the film’s producers, says that having Stone’s “heft and power as a movie star” enabled them to “raise the budget we needed for what was a very risky prospect for studios and financiers”. The actor’s relationship with Lanthimos has encouraged her to take on more complex roles. In his 18th-century dark comedy, The Favourite (2018), she played a courtier to Queen Anne and starred in his short silent film, Bleat. “There’s something between us that clicks,” she told The Atlantic. “I never imagined getting to make the types of things that we’ve been able to make together.”
Born in Arizona in 1988, to a stay-at-home mother and general contractor father, Stone became hooked on performing at school, in part because it helped her panic attacks. “You have to be present in improv, and that’s the antithesis of anxiety,” she told Rolling Stone.
It was during this time that, drawn to material that combined heartbreak and comedy, she discovered actors such as John Candy and Steve Martin. Their film, Planes, Trains and Automobiles was the first time, she has said, “that I saw that you could do both”.
At 15, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting. Her parents’ philosophy, she has said, was to support her independence: “start with the reins out, and if you do something that should break the trust, then the reins come in — instead of starting the reins in and letting them out.” Cast as the love interest in the film Superbad (2007), she gained wide attention three years later with the high-school movie Easy A. Her part in Birdman (2014) bought critical acclaim.
Stone’s roles were often funny, knowing and quirky, and she took these traits with her into the more mainstream world of fantasy and romcom. This saw her star in The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) with Andrew Garfield and the romcom, Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011), opposite Ryan Gosling.
Greg Mottola, Superbad director, once described Stone as “very, very smart . . . [She] has really pushed herself and challenged herself.” This determination won her an Oscar in 2017 after her all-singing, all-dancing performance opposite Gosling in Damien Chazelle’s hit La La Land. It also proved commercially savvy: that same year, Forbes magazine estimated she earned $26mn to become Hollywood’s best paid actress.
Helen O’Hara, author of Women vs Hollywood: The Fall and Rise of Women in Film, says Stone’s successful career is due to the way she “brilliantly mixed her commercial choices (Spider-Man, Cruella) with work alongside really interesting directors (Lanthimos, Chazelle, Iñárritu). It’s the balance that every would-be A-list star tries to achieve, that balance of popular work and challenging material that can take your career up a notch.”
There have been mis-steps — notably her role as the half Hawaiian-Chinese Allison Ng in Cameron Crowe’s movie Aloha (2015), which attracted opprobrium from the Media Action Network for Asian Americans. Stone later said the episode taught her “about the insane history of whitewashing in Hollywood and how prevalent the problem truly is”.
Much of the attention surrounding Poor Things has been focused on Bella’s appetite for sex and nudity, with some criticising the character’s sex-positivity as pure male fantasy. Stone, however, has described the preparation for the role as “difficult” but “freeing”, requiring her to unlearn “life experiences” and making her conscious of the societal pressures that trigger “judgment of your body [and] shame”.
Meanwhile, her early love for comedy has persisted. A member of the Saturday Night Live Five-Timers Club, for guests who have appeared a rare five or more times, she met her husband, Dave McCary, a comedy writer and director on set. (The pair partly inspired author Curtis Sittenfeld to write the novel Romantic Comedy.)
Their joint production company is behind The Curse, a satirical cringe-core television show for which Stone received another Golden Globe nomination, and the forthcoming comedy show Little Films. In her producing capacity, Guiney says, Stone’s “creative judgment, instincts and contributions around casting, story, editing and marketing [Poor Things] are absolutely crucial to its success to date”.
Stone’s recent career choices appear both professionally judicious and personally liberating. In an interview she once said: “I’ve really loved this phase of playing these women who are much less concerned with what people think about them.”
