Emma Stone says her Poor Things character's movements and mannerisms were mostly improvised
Jan. 11, 2024Exclusive: Emma Stone talks her most physical performance yet as Poor Things' Bella Baxter
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Emma Stone’s (now Golden Globe-winning) performance as Bella Baxter inPoor Thingsis, perhaps, her most physical performance to date.
Bella is a Frankenstein’s monster of sorts, the corpse of a woman reanimated using the brain of her unborn child by an unconventional scientist Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), so when we first meet her she’s still learning how to navigate her new body. She walks with jerking strides, dances with childlike glee, and eats messily, taking on the world with the wide-eyed fascination of an infant.
“So that was helpful, just in case we were going from her most primitive to her most evolved from one day to another. But other than that, a lot of the movements and motions and the way she eats and all of that was just us trying things on the day to see what worked.”
“It’s kind of overwhelming just how much she was doing on the film,” her co-star Ramy Youssef, who plays Max McCandles, one of Godwin’s students, tells us. “Between producing and then building this character that just has this real deep character work in terms of physicality and building out the stages of Bella’s growth. It was just incredibly impressive.”
“I don’t know that it changed the way we worked together on set as I came into this right after The Favourite, and between the time that [Lanthimos] told me about it and the time that we shot it, it was about four and a half years,” Stone says. “So we had a lot of time to talk over all the different elements, and it was really amazing to be around as he was hiring department heads and as we were casting and building out the world of Poor Things. We got along so well during The Favourite that we just got to know each other more and more.”
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Poor Things is out now in the US and arrives in the UK on January 12. For more on the movie, check out whatEmma Stone told us about the film’s sex scenes.
I’m an Entertainment Writer here at GamesRadar+, covering everything film and TV-related across the Total Film and SFX sections. I help bring you all the latest news and also the occasional feature too. I’ve previously written for publications like HuffPost and i-D after getting my NCTJ Diploma in Multimedia Journalism.
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