She’s one of Hollywood’s most popular and bankable young actress, this week notching up her second Academy Award nomination ” but privately, Emma Stone wages a lifelong battle with anxiety and panic attacks. The problem started early in her life: As a child, Stone was “prone to panic attacks and debilitating shyness”. “It’s just the way I’m wired,” she said. She started therapy when she was just seven, and attending youth theatre after school also helped her to keep her anxiety in check. But Stone’s old problem reared its head again in 2014, when she was filming Birdman in New York. “The tightrope walk of that movie, the pacing and timing ” I lost my mind a bit,” she said. “I just got to a point where I snapped.”
Stone earned rave reviews for her role in Birdman ” but now admits it took a toll on her mentally. She explains in the interview that she has now identified her anxiety ‘triggers’ ” events that can bring on a panic attack. She doesn’t cope well with being lifted in the air, as she broke both arms falling off a balance beam when she was seven. Horseback riding stresses her out ” “I got knocked off a horse as a kid and haven’t got back on since” ” but she had to face her fear while filming the upcoming period drama The Favourite.
And interviews are tough, she admits. “Before any interview, I have to sit with myself for five minutes and breathe and get centred because I get so nervous. Interviews are kind of like therapy, except all your answers are being written down and printed. I always want to be on the other side of it. I don’t want to be deconstructed for millions. I’d rather do the deconstructing,” she says.
Stone was 14 years old, sitting in a ninth grade history class in Scottsdale, Arizona, when she decided, then and there, to move to L.A. to become an actress. "It's the last period of the day, and I have a revelation that I needed to move to Los Angeles as soon as possible because that's where I needed to go. I know, it was crazy." Even crazier, the budding thespian, who had zero exposure to movie or TV cameras, was able to convince her parents to let her go. She rushed home from school and started working on a PowerPoint presentation she titled "Project Hollywood." Then she called her mom and dad into her bedroom and pitched them her plan: She and her mother would decamp for L.A., where she'd be home-schooled between auditions while her father stayed in Scottsdale to run his successful building contracting business. "It's nuts that they agreed to it," admits Stone with a laugh. "I don't condone it. Everybody should go through high school and graduate."
In 2007, at 19, she caught her first real break, getting cast as Jonah Hill's love interest in Superbad. The small but scene-stealing role finally put her on Hollywood's radar and also inspired a cosmetic change that would alter the course of her career: It was then, at the suggestion of producer Judd Apatow, that Stone first started dying her naturally blond hair its trademark ruby hue. Now she’s nominated for Best Actress as the Academy Awards, but the journey there hasn’t been easy.
