Emma was originally introduced to 1970’s and 80’s comedy by her parents. She would study Saturday Night Live as a child and soon became devoted to sketch comedy. Starting at the age of eleven, Emma was homeschooled a lot as a child, therefore given the time to be a part of sixteen productions done by the Valley Youth Theatre. She later began doing improve comedy theater which she said helped with her high levels of anxiety and ended up improving her skills as an actor. Emma also took private lessons with a local acting coach who had ties to Hollywood.
Emma Stone has a sort of naturalism in her work. She has a way of having conflicting emotions or circumstances in their performance just like people in real life. So say instead of having just one emotion (or two correlating emotions) that she sticks with she has the ability to express more than one emotion that are conflicting each other making her performance more realistic and relatable. Recently, Emma has been taking less comedic roles like in Paper Man (2010) and The Help and her naturalism is helping her rise, becoming a better actor in the process.
When Emma was fifteen, she made to convince her parents that she should move to Hollywood. She made a PowerPoint called “Project Hollywood” set to the song “Hollywood” by Madonna. This convinced her parents and she and her mother set out to live in Hollywood. When she arrived, she dyed her originally blonde hair brown, thinking that it would help her achieve roles that are more serious than the ones she had been doing at the Valley Youth Theatre. Her first couple of TV shows were either cancelled or she guest-starred in them. Her first real break was actually in Superbad(2007), where she stared as eighteen year old Jules, the love interest of Seth. She was later casted in Zombieland and The Amazing Spiderman.
Researching about Emma Stone, I realized that every actor has a kind of trade mark of their acting style that shows it’s them, or that they are the best at. Emma Stone not only has her naturalness, but she gives off this kind of vibe of natural comedy and that is something that I really appreciate because the kind of comedy that she portrays (The Sketch Comedy as previously mentioned) isn’t often used in young actors anymore but it is still funny. I realized that if I am going to be a good actor, I am going to need to take something that I like (like Stone and her comedy) and fuse it to my character. I honestly think that the problem with my acting is that I haven’t incorporated enough of myself in it. I have to learn to act as if the stage were my second home and not worry about what to do with myself, whether to move, stand still, grab something. I think that in scene four instead of mindlessly staring into space like I have no idea what is going on, I am going to put myself into the position of a girl stuck in school who just found a potential way to get out. That is why I think that this acting project really helped me.