Emma Stone talks Zombieland - RT Interview
After kicking off her movie career in Superbad as the high-school hottie throwing the cool party, Emma Stone is rapidly carving a niche for herself as a young actress with good comic chops. Her latest outing is the fright-com Zombieland, in which she plays one of four human survivors (with Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson and Abigail Breslin) blowing away zombies in America. Rotten Tomatoes meets up with an actress who, as she explains, was instructed to move to LA by a voice in her head...
How did you hook up with Zombieland?
Emma Stone: I read the script and told my agent I loved it and then I auditioned with a lot of other very cool actresses who probably would have been way better for the part than me. I auditioned with Jesse -- we did some improv together. I knew he was going to be amazing in the movie.
Did you find anything challenging about it?
ES: I had never done any action before and I'm not very good at running so that was hard. I kept injuring myself. Other than that, it was just fun -- learning how to shoot guns and pretending to be a bad-ass.
What was your favourite part?
ES: I got to shoot a lot of zombies but my favourite thing was to watch Abigail shooting them. She is way more bad-ass than any 12-year-old I've ever met. Needless to say, there were nights that it was incredibly scary and you're being chased by 30 ravenous extras dressed as zombies.
Come on. You weren't really scared, were you?
ES: Yeah! On the second day, Abbie and I had to be chased by something like 30 zombies and it was two o'clock in the morning and I was really overtired. I started getting these paranoid thoughts that one of them was really crazy. I was like, How do you know you can trust these people?! So we're running from these people and shooting at them and in my mind I'm thinking, What if one of them snaps and attacks me? I got myself into a paranoid tizzy about it.
Stone in Zombieland
Abigail Breslin's only 12. Did you start that young?
ES: No, I moved out to LA when I was 15 and I didn't get my first role until I was almost 18 so I was lucky to have most of my teenage years off camera. Not to say I haven't had breakout acne explosions since on camera! That's been nice.
How did your move to LA come about?
ES: I had a revelation in history class, sixth period. I was 14 and in my freshman year, and that night I made a presentation to my parents to move to Los Angeles. Two months later, my mom came with me. I auditioned for three years and nothing happened and finally I got Superbad.
What was the revelation?
ES: It was this feeling that overtook me... it was like a voice and it's happened a couple times throughout my life, and all it said was, "You have to move to LA right now." And I hated LA -- I'd been to LA before, I still can't stand it. In fact I'm moving to New York I hate it so much.
Funkmaster Flex on 10-7-2009 06:50 AM
Loved Zombieland when I saw it this weekend and Emma does a very good job. She's fortunate that she seems to find castmates that she has good chemistry with.