Emma Stone's (now Golden Globe-winning) performance as Bella Baxter in Poor Things is, perhaps, her most physical performance to date.
Bella is a Frankenstein's monster of sorts, the corpse of a woman reanimated using the brain of her unborn child by an unconventional scientist Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), so when we first meet her she's still learning how to navigate her new body. She walks with jerking strides, dances with childlike glee, and eats messily, taking on the world with the wide-eyed fascination of an infant.
"We worked a bit, before we started shooting, on the physicality of her walk and her movements and we staged it out in case we needed to hop around and shoot anything out of sequence, which we rarely had to do, but did do at the beginning," Stone explains to 12DOVE when we ask if these mannerisms were scripted or improvised.
"So that was helpful, just in case we were going from her most primitive to her most evolved from one day to another. But other than that, a lot of the movements and motions and the way she eats and all of that was just us trying things on the day to see what worked."
"It's kind of overwhelming just how much she was doing on the film," her co-star Ramy Youssef, who plays Max McCandles, one of Godwin's students, tells us. "Between producing and then building this character that just has this real deep character work in terms of physicality and building out the stages of Bella's growth. It was just incredibly impressive."
As Youssef says, Stone was a producer on Poor Things as well as its star. Her third collaboration with director Yorgos Lanthimos after 2018's The Favourite and the 2022 short film Bleat, this is the first time they've worked together this closely behind the camera, too.
"I don't know that it changed the way we worked together on set as I came into this right after The Favourite, and between the time that [Lanthimos] told me about it and the time that we shot it, it was about four and a half years," Stone says. "So we had a lot of time to talk over all the different elements, and it was really amazing to be around as he was hiring department heads and as we were casting and building out the world of Poor Things. We got along so well during The Favourite that we just got to know each other more and more."
Poor Things is out now in the US and arrives in the UK on January 12. For more on the movie, check out what Emma Stone told us about the film's sex scenes.
