Emma Stone, the actress who turned childhood panic attacks into two Oscars

Emma Stone

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	November 6, 1988 Scottsdale, Arizona, USA
Occupation	Actress, producer
Known for	La La Land, The Help, Cruella
Awards	2 Academy Award · 2 BAFTA · Golden Globe · Volpi Cup Best Actress

The PowerPoint presentation she made at fifteen said everything about how Emma Stone works. She called it “Project Hollywood,” set it to Madonna’s “Hollywood,” and performed it for her parents in the living room of their house in Scottsdale. It was a formal argument for why she should be allowed to leave Arizona and move to Los Angeles with her mother to pursue acting full-time. Her parents said yes. The pitch succeeded not because it was precocious but because it was controlled — the work of a child who had spent years learning that the only way through her anxiety was to turn it into a performance.

Stone was seven when the panic attacks began. By eight she was in therapy. She has described her bedroom at twelve as a place she sometimes could not leave, and acting — first at the Valley Youth Theatre in Phoenix, then in the machine of professional Hollywood — as the mechanism that made leaving possible. That history is not incidental to her career. It is the engine of it. The recurring figure in her best performances — the woman who builds herself a new identity from a position of total exposure — is not a coincidence of casting. It is autobiography by other means.

Her early career was built on comedy — the dry, fast-talking energy of Easy A (2010), in which she played a high schooler whose invented reputation for promiscuity spirals beyond her control, earned her a Golden Globe nomination and established the template: a young woman at the center of a situation she created and cannot entirely manage. The films that followed, including The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and its sequel, made her one of the most commercially bankable actresses of the early 2010s. Then she started to burn the image down.

The pivot happened with Birdman in 2014. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s meta-theatrical assault on fame and artistic ego gave Stone a role that required something different from likability: Sam, a recovering addict and raw anger in human form, whose confrontation with her father in the dressing room was the film’s sharpest scene. It earned her a first Academy Award nomination — supporting actress — and announced that she was prepared to be difficult to watch. La La Land (2016) was more complicated than it appeared on the surface, despite the lavender dress and the dancing. Damien Chazelle’s film is ultimately a story about two people who choose their ambitions over each other, and Stone’s Mia, the aspiring actress who succeeds at the cost of the love she wanted, won her the first Oscar. She was the world’s highest-paid actress that year. She had come very far from Scottsdale.

What she did next was the more interesting choice. Rather than consolidate the mainstream position La La Land had given her, she moved toward the edges. Yorgos Lanthimos, the Greek filmmaker whose work operates in a register of clinical absurdism — characters following rules no one has explained to them, social structures revealed as arbitrary and sometimes murderous — became the collaborator that defined her second act. The Favourite (2018) was the first film they made together, a period costume piece in which the court of Queen Anne becomes a contest of survival between three women. Stone’s Abigail, the scheming distant cousin who rises by calculated subservience and then finds she cannot stop performing the role, is an echo of the anxiety logic: control through performance, identity through the character you build under pressure.

The critical question the collaboration raises is also the interesting one: is Stone consistently drawn to these roles, or does Lanthimos keep writing them for her because she executes them with a precision no one else does? Poor Things (2023) — in which she played Bella Baxter, a woman surgically reconstructed with the brain of an infant who spends the film learning to be human, and also produced the film through her company Fruit Tree — became the definitional work. She won her second Academy Award for Best Actress. The Venice Golden Lion went to the film. In most careers, that would be the summit. Stone treated it as one stop.

She has since appeared in Kinds of Kindness (2024), an anthology black comedy where she plays three distinct characters across three separate stories, and in Eddington (2025), Ari Aster‘s neo-Western satire that premiered at Cannes and starred her alongside Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal. Bugonia, the fifth film she has made with Lanthimos, premiered in late 2025 and earned her yet another Oscar nomination — Best Actress, alongside a Best Picture nod for Fruit Tree. She shaved her head for the role. The nomination, her seventh overall, makes her the youngest woman in Academy Award history to reach that total.

Off the set, she has been deliberate about building the kind of life that protects the private person behind the public performance. She married Dave McCary — a comedian and former SNL director — in 2020, and describes their daughter Louise, born in 2021, as “the greatest gift of my life.” She does not use social media. She has described the public Emma Stone as an avatar, a creative construct that exists to absorb what would otherwise overwhelm the person who still answers to Emily. It is a useful architecture for someone who has spent her whole career playing women who build themselves from scratch, and knows exactly how fragile any construction can be.

Featured Films

Tags: actors, actresses, Poor Things, Emma Stone, Yorgos Lanthimos, Ari Aster, la la land, producers

Related People

Emily Blunt

Emma Thompson

Emma Roberts

The Rise of Scarlett Johansson

Matt Damon

Heather Graham