Background and career
Emily Jean "Emma" Stone (born November 6, 1988) is an American actress and film producer. Her accolades include two Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, two Golden Globe Awards and a Volpi Cup, as well as a nomination for a Primetime Emmy Award. 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, including Superbad (2007), Zombieland (2009), and Easy A (2010), which was her 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's career progressed with 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 for playing Abigail Hill in the absurdist period film The Favourite (2018), which was her first of several collaborations with filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos. Stone won two Academy Awards for Best Actress—for portraying an aspiring actress in the romantic musical La La Land (2016), and for playing a reanimated woman in Lanthimos's Poor Things (2023); she was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture as a producer of Poor Things. She earned Golden Globe nominations for her portrayal of the tennis player Billie Jean King in Battle of the Sexes (2017) and for her role as Cruella de Vil in Cruella (2021). She then collaborated twice more with Lanthimos, starring in the anthology film Kinds of Kindness (2024) and the dark comedy Bugonia (2025). Stone earned Academy Award nominations for Best Actress and Best Picture for Bugonia, becoming the first woman to be nominated as both a producer and an actress for each of two different films. On Broadway, Stone starred as Sally Bowles in a revival of the musical Cabaret (2014–2015). On television, she starred in the dark comedy miniseries Maniac (2018) and The Curse (2023). She and her husband, Dave McCary, founded the production company Fruit Tree in 2020.
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. Stone 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. Stone was raised Lutheran, but in a 2025 interview she expressed uncertainty about the existence of God. 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, which caused her to develop a low, husky voice. Stone said she was "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 she said that her controlling nature led her to get straight A's. She suffered anxiety as a child and experienced panic attacks starting at the age of seven. When the panic attacks were frequent, she isolated herself from other people. She underwent therapy, but said it was her participation in local plays that helped cure the attacks.
Stone wanted to act since age four. She initially wanted a career in sketch comedy, but shifted her focus to musical theater and took voice lessons for several years. She made her acting debut at age 11 as Otter in a stage production of The Wind in the Willows. She 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 enrolled her in private acting lessons with a local acting coach who had worked at the William Morris Agency in the 1970s. Stone has cited Diane Keaton as an acting influence. 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 auditioned for numerous roles in sitcoms and Disney Channel shows, but was not cast. Between auditions for roles, she enrolled in online high-school classes and worked part-time at a dog-treat bakery.
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 shows Medium (2005) and Malcolm in the Middle (2006), she changed 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 for the role of Claire Bennet in the NBC science fiction drama Heroes (2007). In April 2007, she played Violet Trimble in the Fox action drama Drive, which was canceled after seven episodes.
Stone made her feature film debut in Greg Mottola's comedy Superbad (2007), which tells the story of two high school students (played by Michael Cera and Jonah Hill) who have a series of comic misadventures. Stone played the love interest of Hill's character. The film was a commercial success and earned her the Young Hollywood Award for Exciting New Face. The following year, Stone starred in the comedy The Rocker (2008) as Amelia Stone, the bass guitarist in a band; she learned to play the bass for the role. Stone, who has called herself "a big smiler and laugher", 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. In her next release, the romantic comedy The House Bunny, she played the president of a sorority and performed a cover version of the Waitresses' 1982 song "I Know What Boys Like". The film received generally negative reviews but was a moderate commercial success. Richard Brody of The New Yorker described The House Bunny as a "launching pad" for Stone's career, and Ken Fox of TV Guide wrote that she was bound for stardom. 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.
Stone voiced an Australian Shepherd in Marmaduke (2010), a comedy from director Tom Dey based on Brad Anderson's long-running comic strip of the same name. Her breakthrough came the same year with a starring role in Easy A, a teen comedy directed by Will Gluck. Partially based on Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter, the film tells the story of Olive Penderghast (Stone), a high school student who becomes embroiled in a comic sex scandal after a false rumor circulates that she is sexually promiscuous. Stone read the script before the project was optioned for production, and pursued it with her manager while production details were being finalized. She found the script "so different and unique from anything I'd read before", calling it "funny and sweet". When Stone discovered that the film had begun production, she met with Gluck, expressing her enthusiasm for the project. A few months later, the audition process started and she met again with Gluck, becoming one of the first actresses to audition. The film received positive critical reviews, and Stone's performance was considered its prime asset. Anna Smith of Time Out wrote, "Stone gives a terrific performance, her knowing drawl implying intellect and indifference with underlying warmth." The film was a commercial success, grossing $75 million against its $8 million budget. Stone was nominated for a BAFTA Rising Star Award and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy, and won the MTV Movie Award for Best Comedic Performance.
