How Emma Stone Got Her Hollywood Ending
How Emma Stone Got Her Hollywood Ending:- Emma Stone’s favorite place for sushi in Los Angeles is a no-frills spot in a Sunset Boulevard strip mall, tucked alongside a laser hair-removal clinic and a FedEx store. It’s here, having barely taken a seat, that she starts telling me about her hiatal hernia. “I can’t have spicy foods,” Stone says. The issue, it turns out, is that part of her stomach protrudes “into my esophagus,” which sounds gnarly but is actually pretty manageable, increased chances of acid reflux notwithstanding. “I was born with it,” Stone notes cheerfully. She snaps apart her chopsticks. “I was like a little old man as a young lady.”
Emma Stone’s favorite place for sushi in Los Angeles is a no-frills spot in a Sunset Boulevard strip mall, tucked alongside a laser hair-removal clinic and a FedEx store. It’s here, having barely taken a seat, that she starts telling me about her hiatal hernia. “I can’t have spicy foods,” Stone says. The issue, it turns out, is that part of her stomach protrudes “into my esophagus,” which sounds gnarly but is actually pretty manageable, increased chances of acid reflux notwithstanding. “I was born with it,” Stone notes cheerfully. She snaps apart her chopsticks. “I was like a little old man as a young lady.”
I first met Stone approximately 11 minutes ago, but it feels like I’m hanging with an old buddy. She huddles over the table mock-conspiratorially; drops callbacks to small talk we only just made like she’s citing long-cherished in-jokes; tilts her head back and asks me to examine her nostrils because she’s sure she detects an embarrassing particle in there. Halfway through dinner, two dudes take a table nearby. Stone, clocking them, falls into a whisper: “Oh, shit, I think Paris Hilton’s ex-boyfriend just sat down – the one who looks like an Elvis Presley impersonator.” She jabs her thumb leftward, totally unsubtle as she directs my gaze toward a handsome, square-jawed guy. He might be Hilton’s one-time beau Paris Latsis, or someone else entirely. I look back at Stone, who, despite the fact that she is Emma Stone – by far the most famous person in this restaurant, and quite plausibly the most famous person on all of Sunset right now – is grinning at this maybe-possibly sub-TMZ sighting. “That’s him, right?” she asks.
That Stone is preposterously affable should come as no surprise to anyone who’s seen her act. She’s a resolutely human-scale movie star – the type that somehow tricks you, onscreen, into forgetting that she’s a movie star at all. “She’s not full of shit, she’s not pretentious, and she’s electrically smart,” says Jonah Hill, who acted opposite Stone in her first movie, Superbad.
Stone is often likened to her hero Diane Keaton, and the comparison tracks in a few ways: Both are beautiful, funny, repeat Woody Allen muses. But in Stone’s combination of gameness, wry wit and ability to make an overriding aura of good-heartedness come off as magnetic rather than dull, she’s got a lot in common with another hero of hers – Tom Hanks. She auditioned to act alongside him in Larry Crowne, back in 2011, not because of the script so much as the fact that she adores Hanks. She didn’t get the part, she tells me with slumped shoulders, but that same year, Stone got top billing in The Help and stole scenes in Friends With Benefits and Crazy, Stupid, Love, so, you know, things could have been worse. Watching those movies and the others that Stone has elevated over the years – Superbad, Easy A, Zombieland, and The Amazing Spider-Man reboots, among them – you routinely get the impression that she’s operating an amused half-beat ahead of everyone else; that she’s having a blast on her own terms, unconcerned with whether anyone is even watching.
Stone lives in New York. Her feelings toward L.A., which she once called home, have softened recently, but for a while she couldn’t stand it. “It’s what I imagine D.C. is like,” she says, “where you’re surrounded by all these people who are constantly rising and falling in the local power rankings, and it’s the only thing they can think and talk about.” In New York, she drops in on dance performances, eavesdrops on sidewalk conversations or stays in to bake and watch movies with friends – a circle that includes fellow actors Martha MacIsaac, Sugar Lyn Beard and Jennifer Lawrence. “We go on trips together, we hang out at each other’s houses, watch shit,” Stone says. “I was over at Jen’s place last month – we watched Hocus Pocus.” (Stone dated her Spider-Man co-star Andrew Garfield for several years, but tells me she’s single these days.)
She’s in Los Angeles right now because she has an excellent new movie coming out, called La La Land. It’s a musical, captivating in its sweetness, about two broke-and-scrappy Hollywood dreamers – Stone as a struggling would-be actor at her wits’ end, Ryan Gosling as a stubbornly dedicated jazz-head with fantasies of opening his own club – who fall in love while dancing and singing their way in spectator shoes across L.A. The film’s unabashedly romantic view of the city is pure throwback – the opening sequence, staged on a freeway, sets the tone, transforming textbook abysmal Angeleno gridlock into a euphorically choreographed fantasia. Like Stone herself – who sometimes seems like a screwball comedienne beamed into the present – the movie bridges classic and contemporary eras. “I needed someone who’d make the traditional musical feel relevant and accessible to people who think they don’t like musicals,” says La La Land writer and director Damien Chazelle. “Emma’s very modern, but there’s a timelessness to her, too.”
Even before its release, La La Land has emerged as a hotly tipped Oscar contender and, this being mid-November, Stone’s awards-campaign blitz is well underway. The other night she dropped in on the Academy’s annual Governors Awards dinner; tonight she’s got an Academy-organized Q&A; tomorrow she’s got a red-carpet premiere for La La Land’s umpteenth film-festival screening, and on and on, into 2017. “I feel like I started promoting the movie back in August,” she says, “and it hasn’t stopped since.”
Not that she’s complaining. La La Land features Stone’s most bravado performance yet, and she’s emerged as an early Best Actress Oscar contender herself. When I mention this, she says, “I’m trying not to think about that” – her default mode being self-deprecation, not self-promotion; jokes, not bluster. “I just focus on what I’ve got to do at any one moment, and don’t necessarily think about where it’s all leading.”
There’s something else she’s been trying, and failing, not to think about: It’s mere days after the presidential election, and Stone was a pin-wearing Hillary Clinton supporter. Donald Trump’s win has her vexed. “It’s still so hard to process what happens next, or what to do,” she says. “It’s terrifying, the not-knowing. But I can’t stop thinking about vulnerable people being ignored and tossed aside – marginalized more than they’ve already been for hundreds of years – and how the planet will die without our help. It comes in waves.”
Drinking helps. “Do you want sake?” she asks. We get a bottle and Stone pours me a glass, per Japanese custom. I return the favor, mentioning that I once discussed this bit of etiquette with a chef in Tokyo, who likened filling one’s own sake glass to public masturbation.
“Masturbation? I’ve only heard it’s bad luck!” Stone says, laughing. When I finish my glass a few courses later, I space-out and absentmindedly refill it myself. She gasps: “You just jerked-off on the table.”
I apologize and pour her some more. “Go ahead, please,” she says. “Jerk me off, too.”
Emma Stone recently turned 28, but she gave her first performance at age six, in a Thanksgiving-themed school musical called No Turkey for Perky. She grew up in Scottsdale, Arizona, the daughter of a homemaker mom and a contractor dad, with a younger brother. “My dad started his own company,” Stone says, “so we had no money until I was probably eight – not no money, but living on credit, not a free-for-all. Then his company got successful.” The Stones raised their kids Lutheran (“Diet Catholic,” Emma says) and were supportive, permissive parents – “reins out,” as she puts it, when it came to discipline. “Like, ‘If you’re gonna drink at a party, call us and we’ll pick you up.'” They named her Emily, Emma being the name she chose later upon joining the Screen Actors Guild and discovering another Emily Stone in its ranks.
Source:-Â http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/features/rolling-stone-cover-story-on-la-la-land-star-emma-stone-w456742
