THE QUINTESSENTIAL Emma Stone acting choice comes near the end of Battle of the Sexes, a solid but unremarkable 2017 tennis bio-drama in which she plays Billie Jean King to Steve Carell’s Bobby Riggs. King is all nerves before their famous match; as attendants carry her down a hallway on a garish throne, preparing for a grand entrance, she is visibly fretful over the reputational damage of agreeing to this in the first place. She ducks her head as she enters the stadium — and looks up as she emerges into the light, smiling like a superstar.
It’s a split-second reveal of the machinery behind preternatural charisma. Stone has always known how to let you in on a metamorphosis. Her best roles are those in which her character transforms and ascends: an unknown actress becomes a movie star, a newcomer to the queen’s court acquires power, a talented tennis player turns icon. She doesn’t disappear into her roles; she makes you aware of the games her characters are playing. In All About Eve terms, she’s Bette Davis and she’s Anne Baxter. With her giant eyes — which can project vulnerability or shift into unearthly confidence — and her raspy voice, Stone locates the star inside the striver and vice versa.
More recently, though, she has expanded into roles that distort these tropes. This winter, she stars in both the Showtime series The Curse, as a deluded house flipper who yearns for basic-cable celebrity, and Yorgos Lanthimos’s film Poor Things, as a woman implanted with the brain of an infant who goes on a journey of steampunk self-discovery. In both, the actress seems to be winking at the narratives that defined her earlier work — and it’s clear that she is hitting a new, more experimental high.
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