Emma Stone reacts to reports she called Jimmy Kimmel a vulgar word at the Oscars
Emma Stone has denied calling Jimmy Kimmel a “pr***” after the Oscars host joked about her film Poor Things.
The actor, 35, went on to win the Best Actress prize at this year’s Academy Awards for her starring role as Bella Baxter in the surreal comedy from director Yorgos Lanthimos.
At the start of the evening, Kimmel had shown a short compilation of clips from the film before joking, in reference to the film’s frequent sexual depictions: “Those were all the parts of Poor Things we’re allowed to show on TV.”
Footage then captured Stone turning to say something to her husband, Dave McCary, and fans later speculated that she had muttered the word “pr***”.
Asked about the moment by The Hollywood Reporter, Stone said: “No! I didn’t call him a pr***.”
She added: “What did I say? I didn’t call him a pr***. I wasn’t upset with him at all. I’ll have to look that up.”
Nathan Fielder, Stone’s co-star in the black comedy series The Curse, added that Stone was unlikely to have reacted negatively to Kimmel’s line as she is “always down for a joke”.
Stone described herself as “near-unoffendable”.
Fielder went on to say that most actors in Stone’s position would ask themselves: “Do I want to put myself in this situation? Do I want to do this?”
In contrast, Fielder said that Stone follows and trusts her instincts.
“If she hears something funny, she’s like, ‘Yes,’ right away,” said Fiedler. “She doesn’t consult. She doesn’t analyze. She knows what makes sense to her. I get in my head about things, I’m overanalyzing things. And she will very confidently say, ‘Yeah, that sounds funny. Let’s do it.’”
In the movie, Bella, who has the brain of an unborn baby put inside her head, goes on a journey of sexual discovery, delighting in her adult body and experiencing her first orgasm.
The film’s themes have led to backlash, with some claiming that the fact it has a male director, and therefore a male gaze, makes it sexist. There have also been accusations that the nudity is exploitative and that, because Bella has the brain of a child, there are consent issues at play.
“If it helps, as the person who played it and produced it, I didn’t see her as a child in any of those scenes,” Stone told The Times when these criticisms were raised.
Stone then argued that criticising Poor Things is the result of how people consume films these days and cast judgment on social media. “My mom has this saying that at the start of a relationship you say, ‘Oh we’re so in love we finish each other’s sentences,’” she said. “And then, as time goes by, it becomes, ‘You’re always interrupting me.’ That can happen in a relationship with film, too, especially a film like this, that’s asking more questions than giving answers.”
