EMMA STONE

Emma Stone spent the early days of her career being boxed in as Hollywood’s favorite fast-talking, red-headed indie darling, but she has quietly evolved into one of the most creatively daring actor-producers in modern cinema. With those unmistakable, massive green eyes and a raspy voice that can pivot from razor-sharp comedic timing to pure emotional devastation, she has spent over a decade completely obliterating any expectations the industry tried to place on her.

She first properly became a household name by holding her own against the comedic heavyweights of the late 2000s in Superbad and Zombieland, before carrying the brilliant teen comedy Easy A entirely on her own shoulders. While Hollywood tried to shepherd her into standard, polished love-interest roles in blockbusters like The Amazing Spider-Man, Emma clearly had a much darker, weirder artistic itch to scratch. She bagged her first Oscar for the musical romance La La Land, but her career shifted into absolute hyperdrive the second she partnered up with Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos, leading to her second Best Actress Academy Award for her completely fearless, boundary-pushing performance as Bella Baxter in Poor Things.

Instead of playing it safe after conquering the awards circuits, Emma used her massive industry leverage to become a formidable producer behind the scenes through her company, Fruit Tree. She’s actively backed some of the most unique, left-field independent projects in recent memory—from the deeply uncomfortable, mind-bending series The Curse to indie darlings like I Saw the TV Glow and A Real Pain. She recently re-teamed with Lanthimos for the sci-fi dark comedy Bugonia, completely shaving her head to play a corporate pharmaceutical executive targeted by paranoid conspiracy theorists, completely throwing her glamorous movie-star image right out the window.

Lately, she has been entirely relentless in setting a punishing, highly anticipated creative pace. She’s stepping back into the studio spotlight to lead the baseball-centric romantic comedy The Catch, directed by her husband Dave McCary and co-starring Chris Pine, which marks her big return to the genre for the first time in over a decade. She’s also lined up to join forces with Matt Damon for the next highly unique, multi-million-pound cinematic outing from The Daniels, which is being described as a surreal, high-concept superhero tentpole where global warming is the main villain. Emma Stone has proven that true cinematic power isn’t about maintaining a flawless public image—it’s about having the brains and the stones to actively hunt down the strangest stories you can find.

Insomniacs Trivia

• The PowerPoint Presentation Pitch: When she was just a 14-year-old kid living in Arizona, Emma was so entirely determined to drop out of high school and move to Los Angeles to become a professional actor that she knew standard begging wouldn’t work on her parents. Instead, she built a highly detailed, fully orchestrated Hollywood PowerPoint presentation titled “Project Hollywood 2004,” set to the blasting soundtrack of Madonna’s song Hollywood, which successfully convinced her mum to pack up and move across the country with her.

• The Real Name Relinquishment: While the entire world knows her as Emma, that isn’t actually the name on her birth certificate. She was born Emily Jean Stone, but when she went to register for the Screen Actors Guild at the start of her career, she found out another Emily Stone was already taken. She briefly tried out the stage name “Riley Stone” for a few months on pilot auditions before realizing it felt completely wrong, eventually settling on “Emma” as a permanent nod to her childhood idol, Emma Bunton of the Spice Girls.

• The Matching McCartney Ink: To celebrate her mother successfully beating breast cancer in 2010, Emma decided they should get matching tattoos to commemorate the victory. Because her mum’s absolute favorite song of all time is Blackbird by The Beatles, Emma took a massive gamble and wrote a letter straight to Sir Paul McCartney himself, explaining the emotional story and asking if he would sketch a quick drawing of bird feet for them—and McCartney hand-delivered a custom drawing that the duo had permanently inked onto their wrists days later.

Insomniacs Take

Emma Stone is an absolute mastermind. In a town full of actors who are completely terrified of looking ugly, foolish, or unhinged on a cinema screen, she treats the entire medium like a massive, experimental playground. She possesses an old-school, magnetic movie star presence that completely fills a theater, yet she continually chooses to leverage her massive stardom to fund and star in the weirdest, most confrontational stories modern Hollywood is willing to greenlight. She is an absolute titan of modern filmmaking, and cinema is infinitely more exciting because she refuses to stay inside the box.

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