Poor Things Is All About Female Freedom For Emma Stone
The trailer for the next Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone collaboration, "Poor Things," went live today, and fans of their previous endeavor, "The Favourite," are already excitedly losing their minds. The film is based on the 1992 novel of the same name by Alasdair Gray and has been described as a "female Frankenstein" story. "Poor Things" is about a young woman named Bella (Stone) who is resurrected by an unorthodox scientist named Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Rather than accidentally throw small children into rivers or terrify townspeople armed with pitchforks like the Frankenstein monster we all know and love, Bella's newfound lease on life inspires her to experience a world of liberation. It's as if Mary Shelley wrote "The Pygmalion," filtered through the chaotic style of Lanthimos.
As can be seen in the trailer, Bella's integration back into humanity comes with some growing pains, but also a newfound sense of freedom. She's indulging, she's enjoying, and from the looks of one quick scene, she's exploring her sexuality. During a May 2023 interview with Vogue Magazine, Stone talked about what drew her to the role, and why she thinks a film like "Poor Things" is worth watching. "It's such a fairy tale and a metaphor — clearly, this can't actually happen — but the idea that you could start anew as a woman, as this body that's already formed, and see everything for the first time and try to understand the nature of sexuality, or power, or money or choice, the ability to make choices and live by your own rules and not society's — I thought that was a really fascinating world to go into," she said.
Speedrunning life's lessons
Emma Stone joked that because Yorgos Lanthimos is European he has "a little bit more freedom" around social liberation, but that for her, someone who grew up as a little girl in Arizona, the experience of playing the character was incredibly freeing:
"Watching Bella mark that journey of going from such a self-focused kind of pleasure-seeking — whether it was, you know, eating way too many tarts in Lisbon or wanting to experience pleasure in all these different capacities that she learns about while being possessed by men — to wanting to become a doctor and help people in a different way, these lessons that we go through in our lives over a long period of time are happening very quickly for her, and it was such a great opportunity to live an entire life that wasn't marked at all by shame or trauma."
Life lessons aren't always learned with gold stars and high marks, as sometimes the biggest lessons hurt the hardest. Stone noted that the character had "obviously" experienced trauma (she died young, after all), but none of that was there upon resurrection. "She was the most joyous character in the world to play because she has no shame about anything," said Stone. "I've never had to build a character before that didn't have things that had happened to them or had been put on them by society throughout their lives. It was an extremely freeing experience to be her."
"Poor Things" arrives in theaters on September 8, 2023.