Emma Stone

Emily Jean "Emma" Stone (born November 6, 1988) is an American actress and film producer. Her accolades include two Academy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, two Golden Globe Awards and a Volpi Cup. In 2017, she was the world's highest-paid actress and named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

As a child in Arizona, Stone started acting in local theater productions before relocating to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the film industry. As a teenager, she made her television debut in the reality show In Search of the New Partridge Family (2004). After small television roles, she appeared in a string of successful comedy films, such as Superbad (2007), Zombieland (2009), and Easy A (2010), which became Stone's first leading role. Following this breakthrough, she starred in the romantic comedy Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011) and the period drama The Help (2011), and gained wider recognition as Gwen Stacy in Marc Webb's Spider-Man films (2012–2014).

Stone cemented her leading lady status by taking on more eclectic and dramatic roles. She earned nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for portraying a recovering drug addict in the surrealist dark comedy Birdman (2014) and Abigail Hill in the absurdist period film The Favourite (2018); the latter marked her first of many collaborations with Yorgos Lanthimos. She won two Academy Awards for Best Actress for portraying an aspiring actress in the romantic musical La La Land (2016) and a resurrected suicide victim in Lanthimos's Poor Things (2023); she was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture for the latter. Stone also earned recognition for portraying tennis player Billie Jean King in Battle of the Sexes (2017) and the titular role in Cruella (2021). She has since collaborated twice more with Lanthimos, starring in the anthology film Kinds of Kindness (2024) and the dark comedy Bugonia (2025); the latter earned her further nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress and Best Picture, making her the first woman to be nominated as both a producer and an actress in each of two different films.

On Broadway, Stone starred as Sally Bowles in a revival of the musical Cabaret (2014–2015). On television, she has led the dark comedy miniseries Maniac (2018) and The Curse (2023). She and her husband, Dave McCary, founded the production company Fruit Tree in 2020.

Early life

Emily Jean Stone was born on November 6, 1988, in Scottsdale, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix. Her father is Jeffrey Charles Stone, the founder and CEO of a general-contracting company, and her mother is Krista Jean Stone (née Yeager), a homemaker. She lived on the grounds of the Camelback Inn resort from ages 12 to 15. She has a younger brother, Spencer. Her paternal grandfather, Conrad Ostberg Sten, was from a Swedish family that anglicized their surname to "Stone". She also has German, English, Scottish, and Irish ancestry. She was raised Lutheran.

As an infant, Stone had baby colic and cried frequently. She consequently developed nodules and calluses on her vocal cords while she was a child. Stone has described herself as "loud" and "bossy" while growing up. She was educated at Sequoya Elementary School and attended Cocopah Middle School for sixth grade. Stone did not like school, though once said that her controlling nature meant that "I made sure I got all A's". She suffered panic attacks and anxiety as a child, and said they caused a decline in her social skills. Stone underwent therapy but said it was her participation in local theater plays that helped cure the attacks, recalling:

The first time I had a panic attack I was sitting in my friend's house, and I thought the house was burning down. I called my mom and she brought me home, and for the next three years it just would not stop. I would go to the nurse at lunch most days and just wring my hands. I would ask my mom to tell me exactly how the day was going to be, then ask again 30 seconds later. I just needed to know that no one was going to die and nothing was going to change.

Stone wanted to act since age four; she wanted a career in sketch comedy initially, but shifted her focus to musical theater, and took vocal lessons for several years. Her acting debut, at age 11, came in a stage production of The Wind in the Willows, playing Otter. Stone was homeschooled for two years, during which time she appeared in 16 productions at Phoenix's Valley Youth Theatre—including The Princess and the Pea, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat—and performed with the theater's improvisational comedy troupe. Around this time, she traveled to Los Angeles and auditioned unsuccessfully for a role on Nickelodeon's All That. Her parents later sent her for private acting lessons with a local acting coach, who had worked at the William Morris Agency in the 1970s.

Stone attended Xavier College Preparatory—an all-girl Catholic high school—as a freshman, but dropped out after one semester to become an actress. She prepared a PowerPoint presentation for her parents titled "Project Hollywood" to convince them to let her move to California to pursue an acting career. In January 2004, she moved with her mother to an apartment in Los Angeles. She recalled, "I went up for every single show on the Disney Channel and auditioned to play the daughter on every single sitcom", adding, "I ended up getting none." Between auditions for roles, she enrolled in online high-school classes and worked part-time at a dog-treat bakery.

Career

Career beginnings (2004–2009)

When Stone registered for the Screen Actors Guild at age 16, the name "Emily Stone" was already taken, and she briefly went by "Riley Stone". She made her television debut as Laurie Partridge on the VH1 talent competition reality show In Search of the New Partridge Family (2004). The resulting show, retitled The New Partridge Family (2004), remained an unsold pilot. After guest-starring in the television shows Medium (2005) and Malcolm in the Middle (2006), she decided to change her stage name to "Emma"—chosen in honor of Emma Bunton of the Spice Girls—as she struggled to adapt to the name Riley. She next appeared in Louis C.K.'s HBO series Lucky Louie (2006), and unsuccessfully auditioned to star as Claire Bennet in the NBC science fiction drama Heroes (2007); later called this her "rock bottom" experience. In April 2007, she played Violet Trimble in the Fox action drama Drive, but the show was canceled after seven episodes.

Stone made her feature film debut in Greg Mottola's comedy Superbad (2007), co-starring Michael Cera and Jonah Hill. The film tells the story of two high school students who go through a series of comic misadventures after they plan to buy alcohol for a party. To play Hill's romantic interest, she dyed her hair red. Stone has described the experience of acting in her first film as "amazing ... [but] very different than other experiences I've had since then". The film was a commercial success, and earned her the Young Hollywood Award for Exciting New Face.

The next year, Stone starred in the comedy The Rocker (2008) as Amelia Stone, the "straight face" bass guitarist in a band; she learned to play the bass for the role. The actress, who has called herself "a big smiler and laugher", said she found it difficult to play a character whose personality was so different from her own. The film and her performance received negative reviews from critics and was a commercial failure. Her next release, the romantic comedy The House Bunny, performed better at the box office, becoming a moderate commercial success. The film saw her play the president of a sorority, and perform a cover version of the Waitresses' 1982 song "I Know What Boys Like". Reviews were generally negative, but Stone was praised, with TV Guide's Ken Fox writing that she "is well on her way to becoming a star".

Stone appeared in three films released in 2009. The first of these was opposite Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Garner and Michael Douglas in Mark Waters's Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. Loosely based on Charles Dickens's 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, the romantic comedy has her playing a ghost who haunts her former boyfriend. Critical reaction to the film was negative, but it was a modest commercial success. Her most financially profitable venture that year was Ruben Fleischer's $102.3 million-grossing horror comedy film Zombieland, in which she featured alongside Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson and Abigail Breslin. In the film, she appeared as a con artist and survivor of a zombie apocalypse, in a role which Chris Hewitt of Empire magazine thought was "somewhat underwritten". In a more positive review, Tim Robey of The Daily Telegraph called "the hugely promising Stone […] a tough cookie who projects the aura of being wiser than her years". Stone's third release in 2009 was Kieran and Michelle Mulroney's Paper Man, a comedy-drama which disappointed critics.