In the boiling mid-afternoon heat, Emma Stone looks as cool as you like. There’s no detectable air conditioning, and while I stagger in from the street puce of face and clammy of brow, Stone, as befits a pampered scion of Hollywood, is sitting calmly in a breeze that wafts through the window, peering around the wing of a large cane armchair.
It’s how you expect Stone to present herself, somehow: self-possessed, unflappable, wise beyond her years. She’s only 26, and has been an authentic movie star for just five years – since the release of high-school comedy Easy A in 2010 – but appears to have cycled through the Hollywood gears with apparent nonchalance. Progressing from romcoms (Friends with Benefits, Crazy Stupid Love) to superhero films (The Amazing Spider-Man 1 & 2), from awards bait (The Help, Birdman) to blockbuster cartoons (The Croods), Stone has managed to lodge herself firmly in filmgoers’ consciousness. She somehow projects a sense of chatty, unflappable friendliness with a nicely sardonic edge. Remember when Tina Fey and Amy Poehler had a pop at her (“It’s cute, but it’s creepy”) at last years’ Golden Globes? As a get-out, Stone’s eye-rolling response was about as good as it gets.
Stone has made it so far, so fast, that one of the acting fraternity’s choicest accolades has arrived quickly. I don’t mean an Oscar nomination – though she got one earlier this year, for best supporting actress for Birdman – but a call from Woody Allen’s casting director. Irrational Man, the new movie, is her second Allen in a row, after Magic in the Moonlight; she says she “had a pretty good experience” working on the first one, but snorts with mild derision at the generally-held suspicion that she has become Allen’s new muse, the latest in a long line of recent multi-returnees that includes Scarlett Johannson, Sally Hawkins and Penélope Cruz. “I don’t think he would agree with the muse idea,” she says. “There were two films in a row where the characters, for whatever reason, he wanted me to play them.” Plus, she observes, “he’s working with different people now”.
True: 25-year-old Kristen Stewart has replaced Stone as the junior-fem in Allen’s current film; and anyway, she says, it only “gets attached to the women”. People don’t hang the muse label on the male actors who keep going back to the Allen trough. (You can’t say Allen isn’t an equal-opportunities employer of Hollywood’s younger generation; Stone points out her Zombieland co-star Jesse Eisenberg is putting in a return appearance, and no one has batted an eyelid at that.)
For better or worse she has found herself in a difficult position, cinematically speaking: the focus of Allen’s persistently dubious cinematic instinct, the younger-woman-older-man trope that he just can’t seem to let go. In the 1920s-set Magic in the Moonlight she played a spirit medium who has tender feelings for a man 30 years older than her (Colin Firth); in Irrational Man, she plays a college student who has tender feelings for a man 20 years older than her (Joaquin Phoenix).
So what does Stone think, as a flesher-out of Allen’s narratives? Acknowledging that the chance to act opposite Phoenix “was a pretty big draw ... he’s a truly brilliant actor”, Stone says that playing the lovelorn student didn’t feel weird at all. “I understand all that,” she says, choosing her words carefully. “Just to speak solely of Irrational Man, the relationship is genuinely a plot point. It’s pretty openly discussed in the film that this is a student who is falling in love with her professor, and she wants to bring this intelligence and almost toxic energy into her life.
“I’d also point out that in the next movie I did, with a completely different director, I was with somebody older than Joaquin, and that was never discussed.” (The film in question is Aloha, directed by Cameron Crowe, and the actor in question is Bradley Cooper – who, as it happens, is 40 years old, the same age as Phoenix.) “It’s a Hollywood trope, that’s what we need to discuss. It happens in many movies across the board, and that’s definitely open for discussion. At least in Irrational Man it’s brought attention to. I’ve been in other movies where attention is not brought to it at all.”
Aloha – it turns out – brought its own troubles: a sustained barracking over her casting as a part-Chinese, part-Hawaiian air force pilot called Allison Ng. Stone eventually came off the fence and admitted it probably wasn’t a great idea, saying: “I’ve learned on a macro level about the insane history of whitewashing in Hollywood and how prevalent the problem truly is.”
But Aloha – and perhaps Irrational Man – have been rare wobbles in a career that has been impressive in its momentum almost from inception. Born Emily Jean Stone in Arizona in 1988 – the “Emma” came later, when she joined the Screen Actors Guild – she was a self-confessed “shy kid” whose great loosening-up came via improv youth theatre. Her famously husky vocals were the result of colic. After one or two TV guest spots, cinema audiences got their first look at her in Superbad, where she played the girl Jonah Hill accidentally headbutts – her outraged squawk of “What the fuck!” showed that she was a natural fit for the new generation of potty-mouthed teen stars. She showed she wasn’t afraid to play the goof either, donning braces and a frizzy wig for Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, one of those Matthew McConaughey romcoms everyone would probably prefer to forget.
Cameron Crowe, who conducted a lengthy interview with her for Interview magazine in 2011 – presumably well before he cast her in Aloha – called her a “naturalistic” performer, with an “ability to contain competing emotions or sets of circumstances in their performances in the way that people often do in life”. This, you would assume, is what marked her out as able to carry a film in its entirety, as she did with Easy A, and then allowed her to evolve away from comedy to proper drama. The Help, the 2012 picture in which she played a rich kid writing articles about African-American servants in 1960s Mississippi, was her breakthrough in this regard, but it was her casting as Gwen Stacy (opposite soon-to-become boyfriend Andrew Garfield) in the 2012 comic-book blockbuster The Amazing Spider-Man that cemented her status.
She says she never “strategised” her career; that she was just “stubborn” and only accepted the roles “that spoke to me”. The raddled assistant/daughter figure she took on in Birdman, which has arguably gilded her career more than any previous role, she says she fitted in during a month-long break in the middle of the Spider-Man shoot. Comparisons between the giant Hollywood behemoth and the ramshackle indie production were obvious she says. “On a movie like Spider-Man, when there’s such a humongous crew, being cohesive is a more complicated task. When it’s a much lower budget, you are all banded together making the same movie; it’s not like everyone’s off shooting another scene while you’re doing yours. It’s a very different feeling not needing to please markets all around the globe.”
Stone says it’s the same deal with Allen, even if he’s rather obviously a different personality type than Birdman’s ebullient Alejandro González Iñárritu. She clearly had a good time making Irrational Man, though I can’t leave without floating the idea that it may no longer be in Hollywood A-listers’ best interests to make themselves quite so available to work with Allen, when even the kindest critic would admit is no longer the directorial force he was. It may have made sense for the likes of Michael Caine, Demi Moore or Sean Penn to give it a go in the 80s or 90s, but what did Ewan McGregor, Colin Firth or Scarlett Johansson actually get out of it?
Stone doesn’t exactly turn frosty, but it’s clear that some things are better left unsaid. “I don’t know that I agree with you there,” she says. “It’s actually just a differing viewpoint.” She “really enjoyed” Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Midnight in Paris, and “loves” Blue Jasmine; I don’t suppose too many people will argue with that, but there’s also been a load of duds, no? “You know, I actually liked quite a few of the films he’s made over the last 15 years.” Shouldn’t he slow down a little? The film-a-year output can’t help. “That’s how he gets through his life. When you make so many, it is what it is, but I think there’s a sense of bravery about it. I really do.”
And with that, time is up, and it’s time to return to the heaving throng in the streets. I feel as if I’ve been a bit mean about Woody, but Stone remains unflappable and diplomatic to the end. She’ll go far.
Irrational Man is out on 11 September in the UK
