TUCKED INTO A CORNER booth at a seafood restaurant off the Pacific Coast Highway, Emma Stone listens attentively as a waiter with a handlebar mustache describes the evening’s specials: bluenose sea bass, whole branzino, grilled market-price lobster, fresh sea urchin, shellfish stew made with mussels and clams gathered from the ocean we can see out the window. Maybe it’s the candles, but Stone’s green eyes look even bigger than usual as she nods enthusiastically, taking it all in. Then the waiter turns to leave, and the 26-year-old actress lets the facade drop. “I was concentrating so hard on making my face look like I was listening that I totally forgot to listen,” she confesses. “I wasn’t listening at all!”
We’ve just met, but this feels like a very Emma Stone moment. The self-effacement, the goofiness, the slapstick laugh. Stone is a famous person who is very good at not seeming famous. It’s the kind of loose-limbed naturalism that has allowed America to fall for her, starting with her breakout role in 2007’s Superbad all the way to her Oscar-nominated turn in Birdman last year.
Stone lives not far from here, in a half-furnished rental house she’s sharing with her younger brother and Ren, a three-and-a-half-year-old golden retriever–Irish setter mix. She used to live in L.A.—six years ago, in West Hollywood—and recently relocated back from New York. “It feels different being by the water,” she says. “You’d be surprised at how much of life can be taken up by doing yoga and nothing.”
If that sounds a bit lackadaisical, Stone is coming off a very busy year. Last summer she shot a Woody Allen movie— Irrational Man, which opens this July—and then went straight into rehearsals for a three-month stint on Broadway, starring as a coked-up Sally Bowles in Cabaret. Then came Academy Awards season, which she experienced for the first time as a nominee, and then Saturday Night Live’s 40th anniversary special, on which the longtime comedy nerd got to fulfill a childhood fantasy by playing Roseanne Roseannadanna, a character originated by one of her heroes, Gilda Radner. (“It wasn’t great,” Stone says of her performance, “but it was fun.”) When her run on Cabaret ended in February, Stone high-tailed it to California, where she had reshoots on Aloha, a Cameron Crowe movie that opened in May, in which she plays an Air Force F-22 fighter pilot and Bradley Cooper’s love interest. (Crowe calls her “the soul of the movie.”) Now she finally has a couple of months off, which she’s using to relax and ponder the little questions, like what to do with the rest of her career. “I was actually on the phone all day today, trying to put the pieces together,” she says. “When I sit in my house for too long, I think too much—but I really like sitting in my house.”
Stone orders a dozen oysters and a glass of Sancerre, and warns that she can sometimes make interviews tricky. She’s constantly second-guessing herself, wondering how things might look in print, worrying she might change her mind in two hours. “That’s my problem—I just go 20 steps ahead,” she says. On the other hand, her aversion to insincerity and artifice can make for some delightful moments—like the time she was doing a junket for a mascara launch and answered a question about beauty advice with a story about how she’d recently seen the catacombs in Paris and was struck by the thought that we’d all be bones someday. “Everyone at the table, all these 25-year-old women who worked at beauty websites, were just jaws-open horrified,” Stone recalls, laughing. “But it’s true! We’re all going to die, and we’re not going to have faces anymore. So do what you want with your face, because it will be a skull pretty soon.”
The waiter returns with the oysters, and as he sets them down, he gets a little flustered (not unusual in Stone’s presence). “Sorry,” he says, nodding at the glowing red light on the table. “That tape recorder is getting to me.” Stone looks up and smiles. “I know!” she says. “I’m the same way!”
AS A GIRL IN SCOTTSDALE, Arizona, Emily Jean Stone was a spelling-bee champion with recurring acne who lived on the 16th hole of a golf course. (“Wikipedia says my parents owned the course, but that’s not true.”) She was anxious and suffered panic attacks. “It was really bad,” she says. “The first time I had a panic attack I was sitting in my friend’s house, and I thought the house was burning down. I called my mom and she brought me home, and for the next three years it just would not stop. I would go to the nurse at lunch most days and just wring my hands. I would ask my mom to tell me exactly how the day was going to be, then ask again 30 seconds later. I just needed to know that no one was going to die and nothing was going to change.”
Stone’s parents took her to a therapist, but what really helped was when she started acting at a local youth theater. The thing that would induce anxiety in most people—performing onstage in front of hundreds of strangers—for her helped ease it. “There’s something about the immediacy of acting,” Stone says. “You can’t afford to think about a million other things. You have to think about the task at hand. Acting forces me to sort of be like a Zen master: What is happening right in this moment?”
When she was 14, Stone—a computer geek who had already published her own HTML e-newsletter—created a PowerPoint presentation to try to persuade her parents to let her move to Hollywood. It worked: She got an apartment with her mom in L.A. and a job as a baker at a dog-treat bakery, and before long had graduated to playing the voice of a dog on a Disney Channel sitcom. Within a year she’d landed guest spots on Malcolm in the Middle and Louis C.K.’s short-lived HBO show, Lucky Louie, and then in 2006—which would have been her senior year of high school—she shot Superbad and was on her way.
Since then, Stone’s career can be divided into roughly three eras. First came her supporting years, playing the funny, cool girl third or fourth on the bill (The House Bunny, Zombieland). Then her lead years, doing teen comedy (Easy A) and comedic drama (The Help). Most recently came her comic-book period, playing Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spider-Man and its sequel, as well as Michael Keaton’s recovering-addict daughter in Birdman, which pokes fun at that same kind of franchise. (Stone shot it during a break in The Amazing Spider-Man 2.) When she was nominated for an Oscar alongside such luminaries as Meryl Streep and Laura Dern, she claims she didn’t even bother writing a speech. (“Are you out of your mind? Are you actually insane? Patricia Arquette had that thing locked up!”) But she did take home a Lego Oscar statuette (provided by the makers of The Lego Movie ), which enjoyed a place of honor on her nightstand until recently being retired to a drawer.
It was on the first Spider-Man that Stone met her longtime boyfriend, the actor Andrew Garfield, who, if all the rumors are to be believed, recently became her ex-boyfriend. Their relationship status is a subject of such fervent speculation that just yesterday, when Stone was caught by paparazzi leaving their shared stylist’s office with a paper bag labeled Andrew Garfield, the resulting photographs launched a thousand blog posts. Was she returning her ex’s things post-breakup? Doing a favor for the guy who’s still her boyfriend? Or just messing with everybody?
“See, I never talk about this stuff for this exact reason—because it’s all so speculative and baseless,” Stone says. “Once you start responding—once you’re like, ‘No, that’s not true’—then they’re like, ‘Well, if we push enough, we’ll get a comment, so let’s see what else we can make up.’ I understand the interest in it completely,” she adds, “because I’ve had it, too. But it’s so special to me that it never feels good to talk about, so I just continually don’t talk about it.”
That said, she admits: She could have easily flipped the bag around to hide his name. “Yeah,” Stone says, with the hint of a smile. “When I picked up the bag, I was like, ‘This is kind of funny if there are any [paparazzi] out there.’ There’s probably some rebelliousness that comes out in me after all these stories and people texting you for weeks about something that, for the most part, is not true. But even when it’s false, I would rather just let it be false.”
Stone’s fierce protection of her privacy suffered another blow recently with the infamous Sony Pictures hack. She’s made nine movies with the studio, so naturally her name came up in several leaked emails. Still, she was mainly concerned for colleagues at the studio who had their Social Security numbers stolen—until a couple of weeks ago, when her email address and cellphone number were published on WikiLeaks. “Then I did one of the worst things ever, which was react really quickly,” she says. “I was getting all these emails and texts from people I didn’t know—‘Hi, I’m Joe from the U.K. I like your movies’—and I was so overwhelmed that I went to my in-box and I deleted all my emails. 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.”
The fact that her account itself hadn’t been hacked—that technically, no one was “in there”—was of little comfort. “It was horrible. I cried for like an hour. Most of the emails I’m mourning I can still talk to the person and get them back. But there’s others where the person is actually gone. It really sucks.” I wonder how many unwanted emails she must have gotten to prompt such a dramatic response. Hundreds? Thousands?
“No, no,” Stone says, suddenly grinning sheepishly. “It was probably five emails and five texts. I just went there.”
