Category: Interviews

Emma Stone visits the “The Tonight Show”!

Emma Stone visits the “The Tonight Show”!

Emma Stone stopped by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Thursday (April 11) and gushed about hosting Saturday Night Live with BTS as the musical guest!

I just saw their sound check today,” the Oscar-winning expressed, “and I involuntarily screamed. I’m actually not kidding. It came out of my body. There’s like a chemical reaction that happens.

They’re incredible, they’re cool,” Emma concluded.

Emma also talked about Olivia Colman winning the Oscar for Best Actress for their film The Favourite, wrapping Zombieland: Double Tap, her love for karaoke, and explained how fans can win a chance to party at a Spice Girls concert with her and HAIM.

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Emma Stone Stars as a Suburban Dog Lady, Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

Emma Stone Stars as a Suburban Dog Lady, Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

Emma Stone Stars as a Suburban Dog Lady, Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos in the new issue of W Magazine.

On a bright winter afternoon in Burbank, California, a woman named Phyllis was on her front lawn, trying to control five of her 15 dogs. As always, she was dressed in haute leisure wear—in this case, a voluminous floral-print caftan. Her red hair was carefully styled in a bouffant bob, and her lips painted a bright shade of orange. Suddenly, dogs of all sizes began pulling Phyllis across her manicured lawn, her many gold bangles clinking and her frock billowing, but she was never annoyed. “Oh, my babies,” she said lovingly, as she stooped to pick up a yapping pug. “I adore all my babies, even when they’re devils.” Phyllis gave the pug a kiss on his flat snout and placed him gently on the ground with his siblings. “And now, my little ones, let’s go for a walk.”

Phyllis was, in fact, Emma Stone, who approached her character for the shoot seen here with a terrific sense of commitment. The dog family had sprung to life from the imagination of Yorgos Lanthimos, the director of The Favourite, which is nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including best director. (Stone, one of the stars in the film, is nominated for best supporting actress.) “First, we considered spotlighting a woman who loved stuffed animals,” Lanthimos said as he watched Stone trying to wrangle the pack. “I discussed it with Emma. Since she loves dogs a lot, we went from stuffed animals to real, deep animal love: 15 actual dogs.”

Lanthimos smiled. He is a tall man with a bemused yet inscrutable look in his eye. He was dressed in a kind of dark blue French worker’s jacket and navy pants. Since he was taking a turn as a W photographer, he was holding a camera and his pockets were stuffed with equipment. In conversation, Lanthimos, who is 45, is warm and approachable, but not naturally forthcoming. Most directors are loquacious, eager to hold forth on their worldview, but he is shy, even cryptic. His films, ­beginning with Dogtooth (2009) and continuing with The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), are haunting, unsettling, and disorientingly humorous. Dogtooth, which was made in Greece, Lanthimos’s native country, set the tone: It features three adult siblings who have been isolated their whole lives and kept in a state of perpetual childhood by their parents. The grown kids believe that they can’t leave their cultlike compound until their upper canine teeth (thus Dogtooth) fall out on their own. The scene in which the eldest daughter bashes her tooth with a heavy dumbbell is a chilling statement on the need for freedom—yet, somehow, Lanthimos manages to make it hilarious too.

Similarly, The Lobster, his first English-language movie, is a dystopian comedy about a world in which people must find a romantic partner within 45 days or be transformed into an animal of their choosing. During heavy emotional scenes, a random kangaroo or goat might be hopping or ambling by in the background. Sacred Deer, Lanthimos’s coldest film, is a meditation on the banality of evil: a psychological horror story in which nearly every generous impulse results in an act of devastating violence. The Favourite is also dark, but delightful: a clever, fast-talking duel between rival factions in the court of Queen Anne, who ruled England in the early 18th century.

“When I read the script for The Favourite,” Stone said as she relinquished her dog-walker duties, “I thought, This is like All About Eve.” She plays Abigail Hill, a well-born woman who has fallen on hard times and arrives at Queen Anne’s royal palace as a servant. Soon she is challenging her much grander and more entrenched cousin, Sarah Churchill (played by Rachel Weisz), for the love of the ailing and somewhat deranged Queen Anne (portrayed by Olivia ­Colman). The cousins plot and scheme and fight for power and supremacy, while maintaining the appearance of courtliness. It is thrilling, in the age of #TimesUp, to witness a world in which men are secondary players.

Stone walked into Phyllis’s living room and paused to absorb the decor. Nearly every piece of furniture was encased in clear vinyl slipcovers, including a few small tables. It was decorated, like the rest of the midcentury ranch-style house, at Lanthimos’s direction, with all manner of dog paintings, toys, statues, pillows, and photographs. “I wanted the room to be completely full of fake dogs,” Lanthimos said. “That way, a viewer will confuse the impostors with the real dogs.” He sounded delighted. “Animals are a part of our lives, which is why they’re prominent in my films. But I find the relationships we have with them quite strange. Such as, there are animals we are okay to eat and animals we wouldn’t dream of eating. So odd. The theories around animals are fascinating.” He paused. “And we all love dogs. But what about a woman who owns and loves 15 dogs? What does that say about her life?”

Lanthimos walked to the back of the house, where the dogs and their handlers were waiting patiently. A large Afghan hound was hanging out on the porch, a brown-and-white Australian shepherd was drinking water near a picnic table, and a Yorkie was being cuddled by her owner. “This dog makes me cry,” Stone said, staring deeply into the eyes of a giant tan bullmastiff.

Although Lanthimos and Stone had picked the different breeds together, he was much more interested in them as props for his images rather than as objects of affection. It was as if he felt that showering them with love would be somehow unseemly. In fact, he reacts with similar reticence when attention is focused on him. “After I finish editing a film,” Lanthimos explained, “I rarely watch it again. Years have to pass. When Dogtoothreceived acclaim, it was hard getting my head around the praise. I went back to work. After all, my films are meant to be somewhat disturbing.” He laughed softly. “I prefer to shake things up in an engaging way.”

Stone was now ready for a shot in which the dogs would be exercising with their mistress. A treadmill was set up in the den for the pug, and the Australian shepherd was coaxed into assuming, literally, a downward-dog position. “This one will be so funny,” exclaimed ­Lanthimos. “Funny” is his word for unique, interesting, provocative; to get to funny is always one of his directorial goals. During the three weeks of rehearsal before shooting The Favourite, he had his three actresses engage in a medley of game-like exercises, such as walking backward toward each other to see if they would crash. He also insisted they link arms and “build a human pretzel.” His goal, like with Stone and the dogs, was to erase any self-consciousness, sense of vanity, or “acting.” This need for naturalness even extended to the pups, which, it turned out, Lanthimos thought were a bit too professional. “The dogs are a bit tired now,” he said, eyeing the pug panting on the treadmill. “And that’s good. Even in the surreal, we need to find the real.”

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– Photoshoots & Portraits > 2019 > W Magazine

Emma Stone and Haim Invite You to Meet the Spice Girls, Recreate ‘Stop’ Video

Emma Stone and Haim Invite You to Meet the Spice Girls, Recreate ‘Stop’ Video

Billboard

Emma Stone has united with HAIM for an Omaze campaign in which the winner will get the chance to meet the Spice Girls and see them in concert. Stone, a self-proclaimed ardent Spice Girls fan, and HAIM’s Alana, Danielle and Este announced the competition via a playful video published on Wednesday (Jan. 23).

Performing a synchronized dance that nods to the Spice Girls’ classic “Stop,” the quartet modifies the self-assured lyrics to include their message. “Stop right now, thank you very much, I need — you guys to hear this idea we had,Stone says. “What if you and a friend came with us to a Spice Girls concert in London?

Hey you, always on the run gotta — enter at omaze.com/girlpower, and the best part is every donation goes to support these incredible organizations,” Alana says before the names of each organization pop up.

Donations will support organizations such as PATH, Child Mind Institute, Los Angeles LGBT Center, Global Girls Alliance.

And think about it you guys, think of how much fun this is going to be, us all together at a freaking Spice Girl concert,” Este says before lip-syncing the final verse and walking off with a smirk.   

Are we sure that we want her to come with us to that?Stone jokes, as the other girls assure her that Este is just “a little excited.”   

Omaze is an online fundraising platform that “connect influencers, nonprofits and donors to create lasting impact,” according to their website. Fans can enter the competition here.  

Check out the fun video below.

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Emma Stone for Vogue UK

Emma Stone for Vogue UK

VOGUE

For the February issue, the incandescent Emma Stone took Vogue to the pub in North London, where the La La Land star talked about her life beyond the spotlight, the lessons that come with turning 30, and her most daring role yet: Abigail Masham in Oscar-tipped The Favourite. She also took a moment to share with vogue.co.uk some of the key influences that have shaped her life, from a treasured read to a favourite film.

The Book

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. It’s a super-fast read; you could read it in like a day. It’s two parts – it’s Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. It’s the first part I’m talking about. It’s JD Salinger and I sat down and read it in a day seven years ago on a trip and it has stayed with me ever since. It showed me how writing can be very simple and straightforward and still effective. They’re stuck in traffic for the majority of the story. I really like simple stories with great characters and not a lot of plot and heavy lifting. I feel that way with films too.

The Song

Last night it was karaoke – “These Boots Are Made For Walking”. But really it’s “Where Do The Children Play” by Cat Stevens. I first saw Harold & Maude when I was in my teens and I loved that whole Cat Stevens soundtrack. My mum had breast cancer when I was 19 and I was listening to a lot of Cat Stevens at that time and this song for some reason was very helpful and effective and soothing, because it’s sad but it’s also just kind of the perfect song. It was very formative in that time in my life. I really loved that song.

The Advice

OK, piece of advice. Here’s the big news: nobody cares. Nobody is thinking about you. They’re thinking about you for like 15 seconds, then they’re like worried about their own shit. Nobody cares about the dream you had last night – well they do, kind of, but not really. They love you, but they don’t care. I find that very soothing.

The Trip

The first time I came to London was when I was 18 – it was my boyfriend at the time and he surprised me with this trip. We couldn’t get used to jet lag because I’d never been jet lagged before and so we would stay up all night and then sleep during the day. At this time in my life, I was still afraid of new foods, so I ate at McDonald’s multiple times. We went and saw the Spice Girls at the O2 and it was pretty heavenly. It was the first time I really had been in London; we were in Covent Garden and I was like, “This place is incredible.” Now I’ve spent so much time here and I love it. I didn’t realise this would be a city that would be one of the formative places in my life.

The Film

Oh God, I’m trying to think of ones I haven’t talked about extensively – but I think it’s going to have to be Network again. In the same way “Where Do The Children Play” is the perfect song, I think it’s kind of the perfect movie. The way it’s directed, the way it’s written, that script, Faye Dunaway’s performance – it’s literally everything.

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Emma Stone & Timothée Chalame for Variety’s Actors on Actors

Emma Stone & Timothée Chalame for Variety’s Actors on Actors

Emma Stone and Timothee Chalamet are on the cover of Variety‘s Actors on Actors issue, out now.

Timothee, on Hollywood: “People want a mirror of the things they see — they want to see things shot in a way that doesn’t feel like the sheen of Hollywood is there, and they want to see stories that feel real. That’s what I think. What do you think?”

Emma, on Hollywood: “I totally disagree with you. We are on totally different pages, but whatever, it’s fine. Just kidding — you’re absolutely right. It’s an exciting time. There’s a lot of shift happening.”

Timothee, on The Favourite and Emma’s nudity scene: “It felt like The Favourite was a tone I hadn’t seen you in before. I saw an interview where you said it was a very conscious choice to have a scene with nudity because you felt like it was true to the script.”

Emma, on her The Favourite nudity scene: “I truly have never in my whole time working, which is not that long, I guess — it’s 12 or 13 years now — I have never, ever made a decision because I was like, ‘This is the kind of thing I need to do.’ Now I try to combine all three elements of the script, the character and the director, but at different times it’s either that I am dying to work with this director or the script is incredible, or the character. It’s always been about that and not about that it needs to be this big movie or I need to show my tits or whatever.”

For more from Emma and Timothee, head to Variety.com. Watch their full conversation below!

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Emma Stone joins Timothée Chalamet at Variety’s Actors on Actors Awards Studio!

Emma Stone joins Timothée Chalamet at Variety’s Actors on Actors Awards Studio!

Emma Stone suits up for the 2018 Variety Studio: Actors on Actors on Saturday (November 17) at Goya Studios in Los Angeles.

Other stars at the event included Amy AdamsNicole KidmanCharlize TheronMichael B. JordanEmily BluntHugh JackmanLin-Manuel MirandaFelicity JonesDakota Johnson, Lady Gaga and Constance Wu.

Each year, Variety Studios features exclusive one-on-one conversations with actors and actresses from the year’s most notable films who are expected to contend this Awards season.

Clips from the event will appear on Variety.com starting at the beginning of December with full episodes to premiere on PBS SoCal KOCE (and will stream on pbssocal.org) beginning on Tuesday, January 8th.

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‘The Favourite’ Blows Up Gender Politics With the Year’s Most Outrageous Love Triangle

‘The Favourite’ Blows Up Gender Politics With the Year’s Most Outrageous Love Triangle

The Hollywood Reporter 

This ain’t your mother’s costume drama as Olivia Colman, Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz preside over a royal spectacle of cunning ladies and dandied-up men with a lot to say about Trump-era power struggles: “We’re disgusting and gorgeous and powerful and weak and filthy and brilliant.”

Rachel Weisz has a few choice words about the c-word. She’s just slid into a chair at an Italian restaurant in New York’s East Village — not far from where she lives with husband Daniel Craig and their new baby girl — and she couldn’t seem more like a picture-perfect new mum. Casually yet fashionably attired in a slouchy gray sweater, leggings and sneakers, she’s elegant and down-to-earth at the same time. But then she starts dropping C-bombs.

In England, we say it all the time,” admits Weisz, 48, nonchalantly. “If I’m with another Brit, we’ll say, ‘So and so is being such a c—t,’ and laugh. It’s an old English word. Shakespeare used it. Or maybe Chaucer.” The London-born Oscar winner (for supporting actress in 2005’s The Constant Gardener) forks into a plate of kale salad, pausing when she notices my expression. “Why, does that word bother you?

Of course, in America that word is no laughing matter. On this side of the Atlantic, it may be the second-most-offensive slur in the book (just ask feckless Samantha Bee). But in The Favourite, Fox Searchlight’s $15 million period piece rolling into theaters like a post-feminist grenade Nov. 23 (and going wide to about 600 theaters nationwide in December), just about everybody — including co-stars Emma Stone and Olivia Colman — is slinging the obscenity, as well as a slew of other eyebrow-raising idioms. And that’s hardly the only thing about the movie that’s upending the corset genre.

Perfectly timed for the mixed-up zeitgeist of the #MeToo era — with women making historic gains in the midterms as the U.S. president regularly flings sexist insults like “horse face” — this female-fronted absurdist period piece about a power struggle in 18th century England already is being buzzed about as an awards race, um, favorite. Colman, who has experience playing British royals (she’s now filming the role of Elizabeth II on The Crown, replacing Claire Foy), stars as Queen Anne, arguably the most powerful woman on Earth in the early 1700s. Weisz plays her No. 1 adviser, Sarah Jennings Churchill (Winston’s great-great-grandmother), while Stone is Abigail Masham, Sarah’s scheming cousin who arrives at the court and begins a sexually charged rivalry for the queen’s affections that turns the palace into a snake pit as deceitful as the Trump White House. Rape jokes. Female-on-female violence. Orange-throwing at overweight naked men (more on that later). The film is packed with enough incendiaries that it could blow up gender politics for a generation.

As timely as it may seem, the original screenplay for The Favourite — then titled Balance of Power — was written 20 years ago. British screenwriter Deborah Davis pieced together the partly true, partly made-up story by studying volumes and volumes of letters among Queen Anne, Sarah and Abigail. Somehow an early draft found its way to the desk of British producer Ceci Dempsey, who couldn’t put it down. “It really haunted me,” remembers Dempsey. “Just the passion, the survival instincts of these women, the manipulations and what they did to survive.” Back in 1998, though, it wasn’t so easy to find financing for a historical love triangle with three female leads and virt­ually no parts of significance for men. Dempsey got a few nibbles but no bites. “[Studios] were like, ‘Oh, wait a minute, this is [lesbian] activity going on here,‘” she recalls of those first pitch meetings. “People were kind of, ‘What’s the demographics of that kind of thing? I don’t think we could really sell that.‘”

It wasn’t until a decade later, when Element Pictures co-founder Ed Guiney (Room) got hold of the script, that The Favourite finally got some traction. “We didn’t want to make just another British costume drama,” he tells THR. “[We wanted] a story that felt contemporary and relevant and vibrant — not something out of a museum.” At the time, Guiney had become familiar with director Yorgos Lanthimos, whose third movie, 2009’s Dogtooth, had just been nominated for a foreign-language Oscar. He brought The Favourite to the quirky Greek filmmaker, who saw cinematic possibilities in Queen Anne and her two backstabbing BFFs, and the director began working closely with Australian TV scribe Tony McNamara on freshening up the script. “These three women possessed power that affected the lives of millions — but it was an intimate story as well,” says Lanthimos, 45. By 2013, financiers were lining up: Film4, Waypoint Entertainment and Fox Searchlight. Meanwhile, Lanthimos went on to make 2015’s The Lobster, his absurdist dystopian comedy starring, among others, Rachel Weisz and Olivia Colman. It ended up winning the Cannes Jury Prize and getting nominated for best original screenplay at the Oscars.

There were more delays before Lanthimos finally turned his cameras on the project — like shooting his psychological thriller The Killing of a Sacred Deer — but he started thinking about casting The Favourite as early as 2014, when he sent the script to Colman. She was his first and only choice to play Queen Anne, although the famously difficult-to-pin-down director can’t say exactly why. “For me, casting is very instinctive,” he says. “It’s one of those things when you feel you’re right and you need to insist no matter what.Colman said yes immediately to her third turn as queen: Before she was cast in The Crown in 2017, she’d played Elizabeth the Queen Mother in the 2012 Bill Murray-as-FDR drama Hyde Park on the Hudson. “The main difference,” says Colman of The Favourite, is that “the other queens didn’t get to fall in love with two hot women.

Lanthimos’ instincts about Stone, however — who hadn’t yet won her best actress Oscar for La La Land — were less certain. All the director knew of her work was her comedic turn as Steve Carell’s daughter in Crazy, Stupid, Love. And for her part, the 30-year-old actress wasn’t so sure she wanted to be in the movie, either — at least not after reading the first 30 pages.

I was like, ‘Oh, Abigail’s just going to be this sweet kind of girl, the victim, a servant to these people,‘” Stone says of her initial reluctance. It’s a few days after my interview with Weisz, and we’re talking over salads at L.A’.s Sunset Tower Hotel. “But as [I read more], it unfolded, it became All About Eve.” By the time she finished the script, she was “begging” for the part. Lanthimos told her she could audition but only after she had worked with an accent coach for at least a month. “I don’t think he had thought of an American actor in the film at all,” she says. “Or at least for that character.

Weisz wasn’t his first choice, either. To play Sarah, he’d originally gone to Kate Winslet. When that didn’t pan out (“It was obvious it wouldn’t have worked,” he says vaguely), he moved on to Cate Blanchett. When that fell apart (“Timing problems“), he finally looped back to his other Lobster star, who understood the director’s quirks. “Yorgos never talks about motivation,” says Weisz. “He’d laugh if you asked about Sarah’s motivation.

Rehearsals, if you can call them that, were classic Lanthimos. They mostly involved crazy-sounding games, like having the actresses fast-walk backward toward one another to see if they crashed. “He wanted to see how much we could sense each other without seeing each other,” explains Stone. Weisz recalls another exercise that involved castmembers linking arms to “build a human pretzel.” Lanthimos, though, insists there is a method to his madness. “It enabled them to not take themselves too seriously, learn the text in a physical way by doing completely irrelevant things to what the scene is about, just be comfortable about making a fool of themselves,” he says.

By the time shooting began in March 2017, Stone certainly was feeling comfortable. During one scene, when Sarah discovers Abigail in bed with Queen Anne, she decided to improvise in a way that shocked even Lanthimos, to say nothing of Colman. “I had the sheet up around me,” recalls Stone of the moment she decided to bare her breasts for the camera for the first time in her career. “And as we were shooting it and we did a few takes, I said, ‘Can I please just be [naked]?’ I think it’s going to give Sarah something to look at when she sees that I’m not just under the sheet covered up. Olivia was like, ‘No, don’t do it!’ Yorgos was like, ‘Are you sure that’s what you want to do?’ And I was like, ‘Absolutely.’ I chose to do it. I was like, this makes sense to me. It’s an absolute [Stone flips the bird] to Sarah.

Olivia Colman is on the phone from London. She’s not alone. The 44-year-old British actress has agreed to be interviewed only if both Weisz and Stone also are on the line. It’s not entirely clear why, and the logistics of lining up a simultaneous call with three busy stars in three different cities in three different time zones is more than a little tricky, but never mind. After two weeks of scheduling, the phone finally rings.

A setback for women?Colman ponders when asked whether a film about females being awful to one another might be considered provocative in the tinderbox of today’s gender politics. “How can it set women back to prove that women fart and vomit and hate and love and do all the things men do? All human beings are the same. We’re all multifaceted, many-layered, disgusting and gorgeous and powerful and weak and filthy and brilliant. That’s what’s nice [about The Favourite]. It doesn’t make women an old-fashioned thing of delicacy.

She pauses for a beat, trans-Atlantic static crackling on the line. “Blimey,” she says. “I had a proper little rant there.

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Emma visits The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon

Emma visits The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon

Emma Stone made an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Thursday (November 8) and talked all about her love for the Spice Girls – particularly her interest in Baby Spice, a.k.a. Emma Bunton!

I was super blonde, and my real name is Emily, but I wanted to be called Emma because of Baby Spice and guess what, now I am,” the 30-year-old Oscar-winning actress shared. “So, that’s pretty messed up.

It wasn’t necessarily because of her, but yes, in second grade, did I go up to the teacher and ask her to call me Emma, yes I did. And was it because of Emma Lee Bunton from the Spice Girls? Yes it was,” Emma admitted.

Emma said she can’t wait to see the Spice Girls during their 2019 UK reunion tour: “I saw them in concert in the ’90s. I saw them at O2 Arena in 2008, and they recently announced a new tour and I will be going to that somehow. I don’t think tickets are on sale yet, but I’m gonna figure it out.

The actress candidly addressed her 2017 Academy Awards win on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and her sentiments? Well, same. While an Academy Award may be the highest of honors in the acting world, there is one experience that could rival it. “What was really nuts to me, in my experience, was that it was Leonardo DiCaprio who is Jack from Titanic,Emma stated, fondly noting the actor who awarded her with the title of best actress.

Emma later admitted to growing up with a signed photograph of the actor, adding “getting to be near him was really exciting.” Watch the adorable video above, then relive the very special photographs of her experience with Leo.

Stone also talked about turning 30, her brand new film The Favourite and the challenges of being the only actor with an American accent on set.

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