Now that Emma Stone is an Oscar favorite for La La Land and has had her handprints immortalized outside the TCL Chinese Theatre, she is officially the A-lister we’ve all been rooting for her to become since 2010’s Easy A. And now that she’s officially an A-lister, I think we can all agree that it’s time for her to retire her actress origin story.
Emma Stone has been telling the same PowerPoint story since before she was famous
Constance Grady is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater.
Not that it’s not a solid origin story. As she told it to Jimmy Kimmel on Monday night, it goes like this: A teenaged Emma Stone, determined to move to Hollywood and become a star, decided that surely, the best way to convince her parents to allow her to pursue this goal would be to make them a PowerPoint presentation.
As starlet origin stories go, it hits all the beats. It establishes that Stone was once nothing but a wide-eyed kid with a dream, and it’s an endearingly nerdy contrast to her current glamorous persona.
But she has not stopped telling the story since 2009. In the earliest iteration I can find online — pre–Easy A, post-Superbad (2007) and Zombieland (2009) — it’s already a known fact. “Did you actually make a PowerPoint presentation to convince your parents to let you move?” asks an interviewer for BlackBook magazine.
And as Stone works the publicity machine for La La Land, she keeps returning to her tried-and-true story: She’s recounted it to the Hollywood Reporter, the New York Times, ABC News — and now, to Jimmy Kimmel Live.
It’s a good story, but with the Oscars fast approaching, we’re about to hit Emma Stone saturation. She will be like Jennifer Lawrence circa 2013: inescapable, on every talk show. Anyone in the world who has ever seen a celebrity interview on television will see at least two with Stone by the end of the month, and that means they will have heard her origin story at least twice.
So as she heads into the next phase of her career, she needs another charmingly nerdy “when I was a naive young thing” story to serve as a go-to during interviews. May I recommend her time on the rapidly forgotten 2005 VH1 reality show The New Partridge Family?
It’s a crowd pleaser.
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