Bustle Exclusive
Meet Emma Stone’s Character In Poor Things
In a new featurette, the actor says Bella Baxter is “the hardest part I’ve ever played.”
Emma Stone’s characters have been many things: a girlfriend to a spandex aficionado (The Amazing Spider-Man), a potentially misunderstood dog murderer (Cruella), a participant in an OSHA-violating pharmaceutical trial (Maniac). But she’s never played a character like Bella Baxter.
Baxter is at the center of Poor Things, the latest film from director Yorgos Lanthimos. This marks their second collaboration — the first being 2018’s The Favourite, in which Stone portrayed a scheming worker-turned-courtier in Queen Anne’s royal palace. That movie is plenty weird, particularly for a period drama, but it has nothing on Poor Things. The new film, which is adapted from the Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name, is a bit like if Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was run through a wood-chipper and reassembled by someone on acid.
In a new featurette debuting exclusively on Bustle, the director and cast attempt to explain who Baxter is — both as an “experiment” (or, to keep the Frankenstein comparison going, a “monster”) and as a woman unto herself. Stone says that when she and Lanthimos began talking about Poor Things back in 2017, she was intrigued by the idea of playing a woman with “a brain that is brand new.” She later adds, “I wanted to play Bella because it felt like acceptance of what it is to be a woman, what it is to be free, what it is to be confident, and just a little bit f*cked up.”
As seen in the featurette, a woman with a brand-new brain might smash a vase, slap a man and then kiss him, or say things like, “I must go punch that baby.” Just about anything is on the table. “It’s an incredibly challenging part,” Stone says, adding, “it’s probably the hardest part I’ve ever played.”
And yet, she pulls it off. Just ask Lanthimos: “Working with Emma, that’s the reason this film for me was so exciting to make,” he says. “I don’t know how this could have been made without her.”
Watch the full featurette below.
Poor Things premieres in select theaters on December 8, and nationwide on December 22.
