What has shocked you the most about Emma Stone?
Top 10 Shocking Things You Didn't Know About Emma Stone
we’re counting down our picks for the Top 10 Shocking Things You Didn't Know About Emma Stone
You know she won an Oscar for her performance in “La La Land,” but for this list, we’ll be looking at those lesser-known facts and shocking revelations about this very talented actress who has bird feet drawn by Paul McCartney tattooed on her wrist.
Looking for some extra credit? Leave a comment below and we’ll give you an Easy ‘A’.
#10: Emma Isn't Her Real Name
Her real name is Emily Stone. However, for those that don’t know, when you register with the Screen Actors Guild you cannot have the same name as another SAG actor. When the future Oscar winner went to register with the organization, she discovered another Emily Stone already on the books. This left her in need of a new professional name. She considered Riley Stone and Emily J. Stone, but, as we all know, went with Emma Stone in the end. In fact, people had been calling her Emma since elementary school due to her being a huge Spice Girls fan. Emma Bunton, aka Baby Spice, is her favorite.
#9: She Built Websites for Free
Did you know that Emma was, to quote herself from an interview she did in 2012, “a huge computer nerd.” She used to go online and spend time in various forums chatting with friends and building free websites for people in an effort to teach herself HTML. Also, if you were a teen girl back then you might have been familiar with an online e-zine newsletter called “Neptune.” Well, this was Stone’s newsletter for girls 12-18 in which she wrote articles and had an advice column. She has said that if she wasn’t an actress she would want to be a journalist and “Neptune'' was an early foray into that world.
#8: Her First Job
Emma moved out to Los Angeles with her mother in 2004 to pursue her dream of becoming an actress. But it took her a little while to get her first role. So, between auditions and taking high school classes online she also earned money with a part time job. Emma remembers those days, saying “I went up for every single show on the Disney Channel and auditioned to play the daughter on every single sitcom… I ended up getting none.” But, while all that rejection couldn’t have been fun, at least she was making some doggies really happy.
#7: She's Got Quite a Few Phobias
Do you hate needles? So does Stone. You’re afraid of spiders? So is Emma. However, it’s another one of Emma’s phobias that she had to confront on the set one day. While most women and plenty of men would kill to have Ryan Gosling lift them up, Emma wasn’t as happy about the “Dirty Dancing” scene in “Crazy, Stupid Love.” She didn’t know it beforehand, but filming that scene revealed a fear she had of being lifted high over someone’s head. It’s possible this fear stems from a childhood accident that Emma experienced in gymnastics class. In the end it was too much for her and they had to use a body double for the lift.
#6: She Wrote the Speech
Actress, singer, dancer, Oscar winner, awesome lip-syncer...now Emma Stone can add speech writer to her already impressive resume. Stone played Gwen Stacey in “The Amazing Spider-Man” and “The Amazing Spider-Man 2.” In the second film her character gives a moving and thought-provoking graduation speech. If you watched it and thought that the writers really did a great job with the speech, you need look no further than Stone herself, as it was she who wrote it. Not bad for a girl who dropped out of high school to pursue her Hollywood dreams.
#5: She Lived With Anxiety and Panic Attacks
Mental health is an important subject but one that often doesn’t get talked about honestly and openly as much as it should be. Those who suffer, often suffer alone, but Emma has tried to do her part to destigmatize issues surrounding mental health by being honest about her struggles. Stone has anxiety and has been in therapy since she was seven years old. While they have mostly gone away, the actress also used to suffer from some pretty intense panic attacks as well. A mantra she has used since childhood is, “I am bigger than my anxiety” and she even used it as the title to a little book she wrote herself to express and confront the problem.
#4: She Auditioned for the Nickelodeon Show “All That”
While a young Emma Stone did a lot of musical theatre and took voice lessons, her initial dream was a career in sketch comedy. At twelve Emma came from Arizona to attend an open call for the Nickelodeon show. For the audition she had to create characters, and Stone came up with a cheerleader who couldn’t spell and a possessed babysitter. Not getting cast on the show probably hurt, but it wasn’t her hardest Hollywood moment. According to Emma, that honor goes to the time she auditioned for the show, “Heroes” for the cheerleader role that ended up going to Hayden Panettiere. If only Claire Bennet couldn’t spell, Emma might have had a leg up on her competition.
#3: The PowerPoint Presentation
How many 14 year olds know what PowerPoint is let alone can use it to create a presentation? Indeed, that's what a 14-year-old Emma Stone did in order to convince her parents to let her move out to Los Angeles and try to make it as an actress. The presentation was called “Project Hollywood” and featured the song “Hollywood” by Madonna. We don’t know much about the presentation in terms of specifics, but we know that it worked. Stone and her mom headed to L.A., and the rest is Hollywood history.
#2: She's Actually a Blonde
Remember we told you that people used to call her Emma in elementary school because she was, and still is, a major fan of the Spice Girls? Well, she’s also a natural blonde, which might further explain the “Emma” nickname. In a world where so many women are dying their hair blonde, why would someone with natural blonde hair go red, though? Turns out we have Judd Apatow to thank for that. Apatow was a producer on Emma’s first film, “Superbad” and he’s the one who told her to go red for the movie. According to Stone, she couldn’t go back to her natural colour for years after that saying, “Everything I auditioned for after that they were like 'Let's keep it red'.”
#1: “The New Partridge Family”
Emma’s big break was the film Superbad in 2007. But it could have come a couple years earlier with the television series, “The New Partridge Family.” In 2004 Stone appeared on the VH1 reality competition show, “In Search Of The Partridge Family” as one of the people competing for a role in a remake of the classic series from the 1970s. Not only did she compete on the show, she won the role of Laurie Partridge. If at this point you’re wondering why you can’t remember the series, it’s probably because it never happened. They did produce a pilot but it wasn’t picked up and Emma had to wait a little bit longer for her big break.
