This piece was originally published on 8 March 2024 and was updated on 11 March.
Poor Thing’s Bella Baxter is a lithe, freakish thing, a Frankenstein’s monster forged on a cold metal gurney. Brought – or, perhaps, returned – to life when the grotesque surgeon Godwin Baxter transplanted the brain of an unborn baby into the skull of its dead mother, Bella has the body of an adult, but the unformed and ever-changing mind of an infant. She must taste the world, put it in her mouth, poke her fingers in its soft spots.
Emma Stone, who won her second Best Actress award at this year’s Oscars for the part, is, like Bella, an “experimenting person”. They share a preternatural energy and an instinct for the uncanny. Her fearless and entirely original performance is a highly physical one – a natural mode for an actress whose favourite film is the silent comedy-drama City Lights. Approached by a less accomplished performer, the challenge of moving like a toddler would feel like a preteen am-dram class exercise. But Stone’s Bella, with her thigh-length black hair and tulle-laden power shoulders, seems felt rather than observed, as she totters straight-kneed round her Gaudí-esque mansion prison, or jerks her way around a dancefloor.
Stone has described Bella as both the hardest and the easiest role she has ever taken on. Easy because Bella is empty, a bundle of impulses; hardest because what does an adult with her own life experience draw on to play a character who has none? Bella is remarkable because she has no backstory. Stone is remarkable because of her backstory.
She was born in Arizona in 1988 to Jeffrey, a contractor, and Krista, a stay-at-home mother. She was a colicky baby, and, legend has it, cried so much she damaged her vocal chords, creating her now-trademark husky voice. As a child she experienced panic attacks so severe she withdrew from life outside home and school, and credits acting with curing them. Aged 15, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career; the slideshow she prepared to persuade her parents was titled “Project Hollywood”.
Many claim her role as love interest Jules in 2007’s Superbad as her big break, but really it was Easy A, her first leading role, that marked her out, according to Time magazine, as an actress “around whom Hollywood could build some pretty good movies”. Easy A took a literary classic, The Scarlet Letter, and translated it to an American high school. Stone plays Olive Penderghast (the surname an anagram for “pretend shag”), a 17-year-old who is branded promiscuous by the school rumour mill after she fakes losing her virginity. Olive leans into her new status as a pariah, trading T-shirts for corsets and allowing teenage boys to say they’ve slept with her in exchange for money. Stone’s self-assured, magnetic performance and impeccable comic timing are as least as good as Alicia Silverstone’s in Clueless. A string of comedies followed in which Stone was primarily cast as a romcom Everywoman, but which she made sardonic, knowing, and a little goofy.
By the early 2010s, the studio-comedy era of the previous decade was waning, and Stone wasn’t yet a Hollywood megastar, nor was she an indie darling. In her first drama, she played the aspiring journalist Skeeter in the white-saviour drama The Help (2011). In a well-meaning but simplistic film, Stone’s Skeeter, who is writing a book about the racism faced by black maids in 1960s Mississippi, is stubborn, sparky and likeable despite the moral ickiness of the part. The Help was no doubt a commercially judicious choice by Stone, but the role was far too limiting.
It was in 2014 that her career took its most intriguing turn: who follows The Amazing Spider-Man 2 with the arthouse Mexican director Alejandro Iñárritu’s Birdman? Emma Stone. Birdman is a flamboyant and surreal film, edited to look as though it was shot in a single take, that follows Riggan (Michael Keaton), an actor attempting to revitalise his career with a Broadway play. All the while he is stalked by the titular superhero he once played, at first a taunting, gravelly voice, later a fully feathered apparition. Stone plays Riggan’s daughter Sam, a recovering addict. Scrappy and wide-eyed, she is birdlike in her own way, bruised and ruffled as though recovering from a recent fall. Her bristling cynicism barely conceals her deep pain. She delivers damning, hard-faced indictments of her father before immediately melting into guilt. Though Birdman didn’t mark a sharp turn into independent cinema for Stone (an ill-judged role as a Chinese-Hawaiian women in Aloha followed, as did the deliciously camp Disney film Cruella), it was a revelation.
Stone’s next big risk won her an Oscar. After Damien Chazelle saw her play Sally Bowles in Cabaret in her Broadway debut in 2014, he cast her as Mia in his nostalgic, Old Hollywood musical La La Land. Aspiring actress Mia, who works in a coffee shop on a film studio lot and attends a demoralising number of unsuccessful auditions, falls for Ryan Gosling’s Sebastian, a jazz pianist who makes a living playing easy-listening in restaurants but dreams of owning his own club. Stone’s Mia is sunny and spirited, her comedic background never clearer than in the scene in which she forces Seb to play “I Ran” at a party, and dances – to his moody dismay. Few actresses could convey as much moving nothing but their face as Stone does in Mia’s sung monologue, “Audition (The Fools Who Dream)”, in which her voice rises from whispery melody to soaring musical-theatre and back again. Those four minutes won her the Oscar.
After La La Land came her partnership with Lanthimos, who has allowed Stone to be her fullest, strangest self. Their first film together was the historical absurdist comedy The Favourite, in which Stone’s conniving Abigail fights for the favour of a mercurial Queen Anne (Olivia Colman). Stone and Lanthimos went on to make the short film Bleat and Poor Things. (She has already shot his next film, Kinds of Kindness, their fourth together.) In these bold, curious choices, Stone leaned further into her edgier, more devious instincts. None of this was a departure for Stone – it was the natural progression of a child who found freedom in improv.
Long before Emma Stone was the highest-paid actress in Hollywood collecting an Oscar from Leonardo DiCaprio for La La Land, she was a teenager starring in Titanic: The Musical (a pleasing circularity) at Arizona’s Valley Youth Theatre. Stone was, and always will be, a weird theatre kid. She started her career with no pretensions to being a staid, serious character actress, nor did she disdain the value of simply being entertaining (this she shares with her frequent co-star and fellow theatre kid Gosling). Freed by commercial success and the safety of a creative partnership, Stone’s career-long embrace of the zany has developed into something riskier, more experimental and delightfully unpredictable. She is no blank-slate Bella Baxter, but Cruella de Vil, “brilliant, bad and a little bit mad”.
[See also: Why Barbie wasn’t snubbed]
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