Oh how we love Emma Stone. And although it has been released in the US, the rest of the world is just getting the chance to see her in her second collaboration with Woody Allen with Irrational Man (she also starred in 2014’s Magic In the Moonlight). In a new interview with the Guardian, she talks about the new film and stands up to the controversy.
What is really, really great about Stone is how with it she seems. She takes no bullshit front the interviewer who is prodding her with baiting questions. She doesn’t deflect them, but gives thoughtful and thought out answers.
Firstly, she gives the often asked ‘muse’ question no air, and points out the inherent sexism of the question.
“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.)
On the age gap
I’d also point out that in the next movie I did, with a completely different director, I was with somebody older than Joaquin [Phoenix], and that was never discussed. 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.
More at the Guardian, including which of Allen’s newest films Stone loves. Throughout, Stone comes across as the smartest person ever interviewed, refusing to get caught out by gotcha questions and meeting every controversy head on. Love it. And her.
‘Irrational Man‘ opens in the UK 11th September.
