Emma Stone, the actress who reached seven Oscar nominations faster than Meryl Streep

Emma Stone

Photo: Gabriel Hutchinson / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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

In the months after she shaved her head for Bugonia, Emma Stone went out in public in wigs. She wanted audiences to discover the bald, unsmiling pharmaceutical executive in a dark cinema, not in a paparazzi shot outside a coffee shop, and so one of the most photographed women in Hollywood spent those months quietly disguising herself as herself. The detail is small. It also explains her better than any trophy count. Few stars at her level manage their own image with this much deliberation, and almost none spend that control on becoming stranger. The record that followed, the youngest woman ever to collect seven Academy Award nominations, a mark that had belonged to Meryl Streep, is the result of a career run like a long and patient argument about what a famous American actress is allowed to do with her face.

The need for control came first, and it came from fear. Stone has said that panic attacks began when she was seven, that there were stretches when she pulled away from other people altogether, and that therapy helped but the stage helped more. She was a loud, bossy child with a husky voice, the result of nodules that formed on her vocal cords after a colicky infancy, and she wanted to act from the age of four. Her first role was Otter in a local production of The Wind in the Willows. After that came two years of homeschooling and sixteen productions at the Valley Youth Theatre in Phoenix, plus its improv troupe, which is where the girl who could not always leave the house learned that a performance could carry her out of it.

She was born Emily Jean Stone on November 6, 1988, in Scottsdale, Arizona, the daughter of Jeffrey Stone, who founded a general-contracting company, and Krista Stone, and she spent part of her adolescence living on the grounds of the Camelback Inn resort. School bored her, although her need to be in charge earned her straight As. At fourteen she enrolled at Xavier College Preparatory, an all-girls Catholic school, and left after a single semester. Her exit strategy was a PowerPoint presentation she titled “Project Hollywood,” set to Madonna’s “Hollywood” and pitched to her parents as a formal case for moving to Los Angeles. It worked. In January 2004 she and her mother moved into an apartment there, and between failed auditions for sitcoms and Disney Channel shows she took high school classes online and worked part-time at a bakery for dog treats. When she registered with the Screen Actors Guild, the name Emily Stone was already taken. She tried Riley for a while, hated it, and settled on Emma, after Emma Bunton of the Spice Girls.

Television came first: the VH1 talent show In Search of the New Partridge Family, guest spots on Medium and Malcolm in the Middle, and a short-lived Fox drama called Drive. Her film debut was Greg Mottola’s Superbad in 2007, as the girl Jonah Hill’s character is trying to impress, followed by The House Bunny and Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland, where she played a con artist surviving the apocalypse. The breakthrough was Will Gluck’s Easy A in 2010, her first lead, a loose rewrite of The Scarlet Letter in which a high school student lets a false rumor about her sex life spiral until she can no longer steer it. The film earned 75 million dollars on an 8 million budget, and Stone a Golden Globe nomination and a BAFTA Rising Star nomination. That autumn she hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time and called it “the greatest week of my life.”

Comedy made her famous and then began to box her in. She has said she was dismayed at being cast again and again as “the sarcastic interest of the guy,” and she went after the role of Skeeter Phelan in Tate Taylor’s The Help to break the pattern, learning a Southern accent and reading her way through the history of the civil rights movement. The same period brought Crazy, Stupid, Love with Ryan Gosling and Gwen Stacy in Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man and its 2014 sequel, which made her a global box-office name. Alejandro González Iñárritu then gave her Sam in Birdman, the recovering-addict daughter of Michael Keaton‘s faded star, and the monologue she delivers in that film brought her a first Oscar nomination, for supporting actress.

While that film was in theaters she was on Broadway, taking over Sally Bowles in the revival of Cabaret from November 2014 to February 2015, an experience she described as “the most nerve-racking thing ever.” Damien Chazelle saw her in it and cast her as Mia Dolan in La La Land, an aspiring actress in Los Angeles who gets what she wanted at the price of the man she loved. Stone recorded six songs for the soundtrack. The film opened the 2016 Venice Film Festival, where she won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress, and over the following months she collected the Oscar, the BAFTA, the Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actress. In 2017 Forbes named her the highest-paid actress in the world, with 26 million dollars in annual earnings, and Time put her on its list of the 100 most influential people.

The control has a price, and her filmography shows where she has paid it. In 2015 she played an air force pilot of Asian, Hawaiian and Swedish descent in Cameron Crowe’s Aloha, a casting widely criticized as whitewashing; she later said she regretted it and acknowledged the practice as a widespread problem in Hollywood. The partnership that defines her later career has its critics too. When Kinds of Kindness premiered at Cannes, Mashable’s Robert Daniels called it the weakest of her films with Yorgos Lanthimos and called her miscast, and in Ari Aster‘s Eddington TheWrap’s Ben Croll found that her character existed mainly as an image for Joaquin Phoenix to pine for. A performer who plans this carefully can disappear inside a director’s design, and in the ensembles of other auteurs she has sometimes looked like a guest. The fair reading is that her reputation now rests heavily on one creative relationship, and that she has chosen that risk with her eyes open.

The relationship began with The Favourite in 2018, in which Stone played Abigail Masham, the impoverished cousin who climbs into Queen Anne’s favor by calculated servility while Rachel Weisz’s Sarah Churchill fights her for the queen’s affection and the power that comes with it. It earned her a third Oscar nomination. The same year she executive-produced and starred opposite Jonah Hill in Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Netflix miniseries Maniac, and in 2021 she played Cruella de Vil in Craig Gillespie’s Cruella for Disney, which grossed 233 million dollars and brought another Golden Globe nomination. After the short film Bleat, Lanthimos cast her as Bella Baxter in Poor Things, a Victorian woman revived with an infant’s brain who learns the world at speed and refuses its manners. Stone also produced the film. She called the experience of playing a woman free of social pressure “extremely freeing,” the film won the Golden Lion at Venice, and she took her second Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe for Best Actress.

Behind the camera, the control became a company. In 2020 Stone and her husband, Dave McCary, founded Fruit Tree, which has worked closely with A24. Its first feature was When You Finish Saving the World, Jesse Eisenberg‘s debut as a director, followed by Julio Torres’s Problemista. The 2024 Sundance Film Festival premiered two more of its productions, the horror film I Saw the TV Glow and Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, which went on to win Kieran Culkin the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. On television she executive-produced and starred in The Curse with Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie, playing Whitney, a home-renovation influencer whose ethical branding is mostly a performance, and earned a Golden Globe nomination for it.

Kinds of Kindness, in 2024, asked her to play three different women across three stories. Eddington, which premiered at Cannes in 2025 with Phoenix, Pedro Pascal and Austin Butler, put her in Aster’s pandemic-era New Mexico. Then came Bugonia, the fifth collaboration with Lanthimos counting Bleat, a remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s Korean cult film Save the Green Planet! in which she plays Michelle, a pharmaceutical chief executive kidnapped by two men, one of them played by Jesse Plemons, who are convinced she is an alien. The film opened in October 2025. In January 2026 the Academy nominated her twice for it, for Best Actress and, as a producer, for Best Picture. That made her the first woman nominated as both producer and actress for each of two different films, and took her total to seven nominations at thirty-seven, ahead of the pace Streep had set. At the ceremony on March 15, 2026, Best Actress went to Jessie Buckley for Hamnet and Best Picture to One Battle After Another.

Stone met McCary in 2016, when she hosted Saturday Night Live and he was one of its segment directors. They married in a private ceremony in 2020, their daughter was born in 2021, and the family has lived in New York City. Her private life stays private by design; what the public receives is the work and a carefully chosen handful of interviews.

Her autumn has been busy away from the screen. She gave a quiet assist to You Can See Everything, the A24 documentary about Elizabeth Holmes that her The Curse co-star Nathan Fielder made with Lance Oppenheim. Oppenheim has said that when the filmmakers could not persuade people in Holmes’s circle to appear, Stone connected them with Amanda Seyfried, who plays Holmes in the reenactments, and Stone appears in the film’s special thanks. Fruit Tree’s next release is The Debut, directed by Eisenberg and starring Julianne Moore as a shy suburban housewife who auditions for her local community theater musical, due in December.

The next test of the system she has built is the furthest she has strayed from Lanthimos since the comedies that made her famous. The Catch is a Universal romantic comedy directed by McCary, from a script by Jen Statsky and Travis Helwig, in which she stars opposite Chris Pine and which Fruit Tree produces. Universal has dated it for May 21, 2027. A sequel to Cruella is in development, and she and Jennifer Lawrence are attached to produce a film about Miss Piggy written by Cole Escola. The girl who once argued her way out of Arizona with a slide deck is now in a position to commission her own arguments, and the next one is that a two-time Oscar winner who spent years playing women nobody could domesticate can still carry the oldest kind of studio comedy.