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Emma Stone in Poor Things. ©Yorgos Lanthimos/Searchlight Pictures

Scottsdale, Arizona. Emily Stone is 15 years old. She and tragedy. With Lanthimos, an independent auteur who
gives her parents a PowerPoint presentation showing, step does not assimilate to any particular film school outside his
by step, the path she wanted to take to become a movie star. own, Emma has already worked in The Favourite, in the art
Having seen her at work in school plays and dance recitals, short Bleat (produced for the Greek National Opera), in Kinds
Dad and Mom realize she means business. Mom started of Kindness (an episodic film shot in New Orleans in 2022 and
accompanying her to Los Angeles, the land of vampires coming to theaters this year). Not only that, the collaboration
always on the lookout for fresh–blooded actresses, where continues even after the Oscars. A new, very mysterious title
they first discovered that there was already an Emily Stone is already in the works and will be filmed entirely in Greece.
at the actors’ union and, therefore, better to change. Next November 6 Emma will be 35 years old, and she
With the new name, Emma, begins the story of one of the has already fulfilled the plan she had at 15, probably beyond
most prodigious careers of recent years. She never misses her own dreams as a young girl: awards (in addition to the
a beat or even nearly miss a beat. After her time in small two Oscars, she has collected Baftas, Golden Globes, a Volpi
parts, the breakthrough comes with Easy A, a movie set in Cup and others, not counting nominations), a collaboration
school that, however, immediately becomes a small success. with a major global luxury brand (she is an ambassador for
From that moment on, she has never stopped, like a pinball Louis Vuitton), performances in the theater. In the meantime,
in a pinball machine: the perfect romantic comedy (Crazy, she also managed to get married (to television director and
Stupid, Love), the committed female–driven film (The Help), author Dave McCary) and have a little girl, Louise, who is now
the superhero movie (Spider Man) and art–house cinema, three years old.
from Woody Allen to Alejandro González Iñárritu. Success and quality won with a lot of hard work, but that
At this point, she has already won two Oscars, the first goes without saying. What is less obvious, and is Emma’s
for La La Land and the second for Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor secret, is the naturalness with which she seems to handle
Things, a movie in which she plays a character who has everything. At the Oscars her dress fell apart, she made a
become a cult figure: Bella Baxter, a woman with the brains moment of general hilarity out of it, ending her speech with
of a newborn girl who, before our viewing eyes, becomes an which she thanked for the statuette: “Don’t look at the back
adult in a crescendo of transgression and awareness, humor of my dress!”

Protagonist Portrait 63