Rolling Stone Cover Story on 'La La Land' Star Emma Stone'La La Land' star left an anxious childhood in Arizona to become America's most freewheeling leading lady – and a heavily buzzed Oscar favorite. 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 Fed. Ex store. It's here, having barely taken a seat, that she starts telling me about her hiatal hernia.
The issue, it turns out, is that part of her stomach protrudes . She snaps apart her chopsticks. 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: . 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. 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.
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 2. 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.
La La Land is a 2016 American musical romantic comedy-drama film written and directed by Damien Chazelle. It stars Ryan Gosling as a jazz pianist and Emma Stone as an.
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 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.
La La Land is unadulterated cinematic bliss, even if the story it tells isn’t always a happy one. A man and a woman’s paths cross in the middle of a massive Los. Your Second Life virtual world guide to the best in games, arts, chat locations, avatar fashion, music and more. The Eyes of My Mother (December 2 in limited release) A chilling black-and-white horror film that split audiences at last January's Sundance Film Festival, Nicolas.
Like Stone herself – who sometimes seems like a screwball comedienne beamed into the present – the movie bridges classic and contemporary eras. 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 2.
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, .
Donald Trump's win has her vexed. 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. 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. I've only heard it's bad luck! When I finish my glass a few courses later, I space- out and absentmindedly refill it myself.
She gasps: . She grew up in Scottsdale, Arizona, the daughter of a homemaker mom and a contractor dad, with a younger brother. Then his company got successful.
I've been told that I'm hindering the process by bringing up an opinion or an idea. There have been times when I've improvised, they've laughed at my joke and then given it to my male co- star. She was a deeply nervous kid, ill- at- ease and prone to debilitating panic attacks – . I could sense it. Not a hallucination, just a tightening in my chest, feeling I couldn't breathe, like the world was going to end. There were some flare- ups like that, but my anxiety was constant.
I would ask my mom a hundred times how the day was gonna lay out. What time was she gonna drop me off? Where was she gonna be? What would happen at lunch? Feeling nauseous. Watch Assassin`S Creed (2016) Movie Stream more. At a certain point, I couldn't go to friends' houses anymore – I could barely get out the door to school. And every time I listen to it, it grows bigger.
If I listen to it enough, it crushes me. But if I turn my head and keep doing what I'm doing – let it speak to me, but don't give it the credit it needs – then it shrinks down and fades away. He does that incredible thing that Shirley Mac. Laine does in The Apartment, and that Gene Wilder did so beautifully, too, which is combining heartbreak and comedy.
That's what life is, right? There's still weird, funny shit that happens even when life is really dark. So it was not outright delusion when Stone, at age 1. L. A. She made her pitch in the form of a Power.
Point presentation, which she entitled . They decided to let her give acting a shot, too, and in January 2. Stone moved with her mother into a unit at the Park La. Brea apartment complex, just south of Hollywood.
The move was ostensibly temporary, Stone says, ? I'm not getting auditions, but I gotta stay here.'. I've bumped into Louis since and we're always like, 'Heyyy, sooo, remember that?'. The unifying trait across her portrayals is a core decency – on display from The Help, where she played a privileged white woman in the Sixties- era South, to the Best Picture winner Birdman, where she got a Best Supporting Actress nomination playing Michael Keaton's daughter, fresh out of rehab. This part is one of the very few times that Stone has portrayed a fuck- up (since offering to blow Louis C.
K., anyway). She describes herself as having an eager- to- please side, and she concedes that it's hard to imagine her getting cast as a villain anytime soon. The film, which director Alejandro Gonz. Later that night, Edward Norton and I were shooting on a rooftop at, like, 2 a. Hd Video 720P Regression (2016). We'd done this scene 3. Alejandro wasn't getting what he wanted.
He said, 'Maybe it's not going to work.' I went to my dressing room, pacing, like, I can't do it. I'm losing my fucking mind. This thing came over me. I'm usually a people- pleaser, but I felt like, fuck it.
I don't even care anymore. So when we went back to do the scene, I was crazy, spitting. And Alejandro goes, 'Beautiful — there it is!'. When she was first considering the role, Chazelle recalls, . I don't want to cheat it.
I've bumped into Louis since and we're always like, 'Heyyy, sooo, remember that?'. Given my joke away. Or it's been me saying, 'I really don't think this line is gonna work,' and being told, 'Just say it, just say it, if it doesn't work we'll cut it out' – and they didn't cut it out, and it really didn't work!'. It's all the things you don't think about as an actor. I like being a cog in the machine. The valet at her hotel raised his eyebrows an extremely dignified millimeter when Stone came through the front doors and hopped aboard.
It's a couple of days after our dinner, and we've decided to go for a morning hike at Griffith Park.