The Untold Truth Of Emma Stone
Emma Stone first emerged in the mainstream as a minor character in Superbad, but she's gone far in the entertainment biz. Since her big-screen debut, she's managed to live out every girl's dream: kissing Ryan Gosling. Oh yeah, and she also developed a massive career, managed to stay down to earth, and ultimately won an Oscar for La La Land.
Despite Stone's success, the actress generally keeps a quiet private life (as much as you can if your BFF is Jennifer Lawrence). Her social media is locked up tight, and she doesn't talk about personal relationships in interviews. Needless to say, there's a whole lot that fans don't know about the Maniac star.
From details about her secret Pinterest account to her fun time getting high with an ex in Disneyland, this is the untold truth of Emma Stone. Warning: It'll only make you want to join her group of friends.
She knows her way around PowerPoint
Long before La La Land got 14 Oscar nominations, Emma Stone was working on a different project — one some might argue is even more confusing than navigating a movie set. That's right — we're talking about Microsoft PowerPoint. Her tech skills were actually the trigger that led her to a life of Hollywood stardom.
Stone told The Hollywood Reporter that she created a slideshow dubbed "Project Hollywood" in order to convince her parents to let her drop out of high school and move from Arizona to Los Angeles. It was the result of a random epiphany that came to her while she was sitting in ninth grade history class. Later that day, she pitched the idea of moving to her parents in what seemed like an at-home business meeting. Then, she moved to L.A. with her mom to start doing auditions.
"It's the last period of the day, and I have a revelation that I needed to move to Los Angeles as soon as possible because that's where I needed to go. I know, it was crazy," Stone told THR, later adding, "It's nuts that they agreed to it. ... I don't condone it. Everybody should go through high school and graduate."
She suffers from anxiety
After watching Stone portray the rebellious, self-assured Olive in Easy A, it's hard to imagine the actress ever struggling with anxiety. But it's something that Stone has battled for a long time, though there have been moments when it was especially hard to deal with. "Losing my anonymity after Easy A, it was like being 7 years old all over again," Stone revealed to The Hollywood Reporter. "It terrified me."
According to THR, Stone started therapy at age seven to cope with panic attacks and debilitating shyness. It followed her into adulthood, but she's never let it affect her career. Though she was thrown from a horse as a kid, she still learned how to horseback ride for her role in The Favourite. And while playing sports may be "stressful," she was still able to nail Battle of the Sexes and even ended up hitting a ball around with Billie Jean King. Her symptoms were particularly bad during Birdman, but her performance ultimately landed the actress an Academy Award nomination.
"The tightrope walk of that movie, the pacing and timing — I lost my mind a bit," she told THR. "I just got to a point where I snapped."
She's worked an odd job
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Stone was only 19 years old when she landed Superbad. Thankfully, that saved her from decades of having to work a dead-end day job, but that doesn't mean she never dabbled in the workforce outside of Hollywood. Shortly after moving to Los Angeles, Stone scored a role on the ill-fated VH1 pilot The New Partridge Family. Beyond that, she only had sporadic roles including a cameo in Malcolm in the Middle. When it came down to it, Stone needed a job like the thousands of Hollywood hopefuls that came before her.
But Stone didn't follow the oh-so-familiar Tinsel Town trope of waiting tables or driving for Uber (mainly because Uber didn't exist in the early aughts). Instead she took on a job at a gourmet dog-biscuit bakery to bring home the bacon between gigs.
"They were made with human-quality ingredients, but they still tasted like dog food," she told THR.
We want to know how many dog biscuits Stone tried in her tenure. Could any job possibly be more L.A.?
The secret behind her signature red hair
Emma Stone's signature is her fiery red hair — that and her sense of humor. The color looks so natural on the star that it's hard to believe that she's not actually a natural redhead (her impeccable root maintenance certainly doesn't hurt, either). In real life, Stone is a natural blonde, but the starlet admitted to StyleCaster that she identifies more with the rosy hue.
"My mom's a redhead, so maybe I grew up seeing it more than seeing myself in a mirror," she said. "But I like blonde, too. It's just hair."
Though we're so used to seeing Stone as a ginger, her red hair may have never happened if it wasn't for Judd Apatow, the same guy who helped bring Lena Dunham into the spotlight. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Superbad producer suggested the starlet change things up after she signed onto the comedy. It just sort of became her thing after that. However, Stone has gone back to her natural color for projects like Netflix's Maniac.
She should have said goodbye to Aloha
Aloha was arguably Emma Stone's biggest train wreck. According to Box Office Mojo, it grossed a mere $26.25 million in worldwide sales. In contrast, Forbes claims La La Land was 2016's top-grossing Oscar movie pulling in more than $340.5 million globally. Aloha was savagely panned by critics, who especially took issue with the fact that Stone was cast to play a woman with Asian heritage. The Hairpin called it the "decade's worst movie catastrophe." Complex labeled it "white as hell," and even Sandy Wexler, the Adam Sandler flick we can't be sure anyone actually saw, snagged a higher rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Stone ended up taking the failure in stride and chalked it up to a learning experience. In an interview with News.com.au, the star admitted she became the "butt of many jokes," but it helped open her eyes to some major injustices in the film industry.
"I've learned on a macro level about the insane history of whitewashing in Hollywood and how prevalent the problem truly is," she said. "It's ignited a conversation that's very important."
According to The Guardian, Cameron Crowe has since apologized for his casting choice.
That whole hacking scandal
In today's culture, emails are a pretty big deal. Most of us tend to have inboxes that stretch into the thousands, and the rare person who likes to live dangerously might even have enough unread messages to push five figures. The truth is our email history is like a biography, spanning career milestones, breakups, and regrettable Facebook arguments with our weirdly bigoted distant cousin. Who would give that up? The answer is Emma Stone.
Stone was one of the unfortunate celebrities involved in the 2014 Sony Pictures hack, which led to the resignation of Sony bigwig Amy Pascal and criminal charges for a North Korean spy. As a result of the breech, Stone's email address and phone number were leaked. The incident was reportedly overwhelming for Stone, who deleted all of her emails and "cried for like an hour."
"I did one of the worst things ever, which was react really quickly. I was getting all these emails and texts from people I didn't know ... and I was so overwhelmed that I went to my inbox and I deleted all my emails," she told WSJ Magazine (via Vogue). "In about a 30-second span, I hit 'Select All' and 'Delete Forever,' and thousands of emails, like six years of emails, are now gone forever. I was just so freaked out that someone was in there."
Does she have secret social media?
Stone may be the only millennial on the planet who's not publicly on social media, and she's been very vocal about her distaste for using the available platforms. In a 2014 interview with Vanity Fair, the star claimed she didn't like the "need to be liked" or "validated, in a way, through no one that you know." Since then, she faced a significant amount of peer pressure to launch an Instagram account (you can blame Billy on the Street), but it seemed like she mostly stuck to her guns — or did she?
According to W magazine, Stone's BFF Jennifer Lawrence owned up to having a fake Instagram account, and she might not be the only one. In 2013, the Maniac actress told Ryan Seacrest that her Twitter account was hacked, and she hasn't used it since (via Entertainment Tonight). Strangely enough, when E! News asked the star if she had a "secret one" that she might "stalk people with" two years later, she didn't say no. We got a solid (and undeniably sheepish) "maybe." So, while we won't see Stone on Twitter anytime soon, she might be seeing us.
There is one thing we're sure of though: The gal's got a secret Pinterest account. In 2014, she told Jimmy Fallon that she'd be "humiliated if anyone could see how many inspirational quotes [she has]."
One role really changed her
No one said fashion was comfortable, but there's a reason why clothes like corsets fell out of fashion. Why cut off the circulation to your chest when you could just throw on some Spanx?
Emma Stone took Kardashian-era waist trainers to an entirely new (or very, very old) level with her 18th century period flick The Favourite. It was her first time wearing a corset on the job and the garment was so tight that it temporarily made her organs shift. Yes, that's apparently a real thing that happens.
Stone told The Graham Norton Show (via The Hollywood Reporter) that she made it through the first month of filming by sniffing menthol, which almost made her feel like she was "in a wide open space" before she went "back to not breathing."
"After about a month, my organs shifted because they have to. It was only temporary, but it was gross," she said. "The bottom half of my stomach, whatever, I'm not a doctor, whatever is in there, went down that way, and I guess just my ribs stayed up."
Stone's organs have since returned to their proper homes, but there's no word on if the experience had a lasting impact on her psyche.
She really might be super bad
As most of us know already know, Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone are totally goals when it comes to how to get on with an ex. Though they split in 2015, Garfield claimed in 2016 that Stone would be his pick if he could only choose one actor be with on a desert island, and he reportedly shed a tear over her Oscar win.
And Stone and Garfield have had a lot of good times. In an interview with W magazine, Garfield admitted that a bunch of his friends surprised him on his 29th birthday. They ended up eating weed brownies and going to Disneyland, where Garfield proceeded to ride Space Mountain three times in a row and dance through the theme park. Though he doesn't explicitly mention Stone, BuzzFeed dug up some images that seem to be from their trip.
"It was perfect. It was heaven. I was with my favorite people in the world," Garfield said, later adding, "I freaked out on It's A Small World. I was like, 'It is ... It is a f**ing small world."
Stone may look like the girl next door, but this girl next door is the kind you'd get high with after school while your parents are still at work (if you're of age and in Hollywood, where it's legal). They don't call it being stoned for nothing