In January 2026, when the 98th Academy Award nominations were announced, Emma Stone received two more – Best Actress and Best Picture as a producer – for Yorgos Lanthimos’s dark comedy Bugonia. At thirty-seven, she became the youngest woman in Oscar history to reach seven total nominations, breaking a record held by Meryl Streep since 1988. It was a striking milestone, but what made it genuinely remarkable was the context. Stone had not arrived here through the conventional machinery of studio vehicles and prestige dramas. She had arrived through one of the most improbable creative partnerships in contemporary cinema – four films with a Greek director whose work routinely alienates mainstream audiences – and she had done it on her own terms.
This is not the story of a rising star. Stone is not rising; she has already risen, peaked, pivoted, and reinvented, sometimes within the space of a single year. What she has built since 2018 is something rarer: a body of work that is simultaneously commercially viable and artistically uncompromising, held together by a single creative relationship that has fundamentally altered what audiences expect from one of Hollywood’s most bankable leading ladies.
The Lanthimos Variable
The partnership began in 2018 with The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos’s corrosive period satire about Queen Anne’s court. Stone played Abigail Masham, a scheming outsider clawing her way into power opposite Olivia Colman’s fragile monarch and Rachel Weisz’s formidable Lady Sarah. The film earned ten Oscar nominations and won for Colman, but for Stone it served a different purpose: it proved she could disappear into a role that offered no easy sympathy, no conventional likability. Abigail was ambitious, duplicitous, and morally fluid. Stone played her with a knife-edge precision that suggested she was done being America’s sweetheart.
“I had never worked with anyone like him,” Stone told Vogue in 2023, reflecting on what Lanthimos demanded of her. “He strips everything away. There’s no safety net.”
That stripping-away became the template. Poor Things, adapted from Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel by screenwriter Tony McNamara, arrived in 2023 as Stone’s most ambitious collaboration with Lanthimos yet. She played Bella Baxter, a woman reanimated with the brain of an infant, who embarks on a journey of sexual, intellectual, and emotional awakening across a steampunk Victorian landscape. The role required Stone to演 literally演 a character who learns to walk, talk, think, and desire – all within a narrative that was simultaneously a Frankenstein riff, a feminist fable, and a pitch-black comedy.
The film premiered at the 80th Venice International Film Festival on 1 September 2023, where it won the Golden Lion – the festival’s highest honour. It went on to receive eleven Oscar nominations and won four, including Best Actress for Stone, her second in the category after La La Land in 2017. She was also nominated as a producer, making her only the second woman after Frances McDormand to earn dual acting and producing nominations for the same film. Poor Things grossed $117.6 million worldwide against a $35 million budget, becoming Lanthimos’s highest-grossing film by a significant margin.
As the screenwriter Tony McNamara observed at the time: “Quite a few people said to me they didn’t know they needed to see a movie as wild as this, but as soon as they saw it, they said it made them feel like cinema was alive and they could imagine beyond what they thought was possible.”
Kinds of Kindness and the Auteur’s Gamble
Between Poor Things and Bugonia, Stone appeared in Kinds of Kindness (2024), Lanthimos’s anthology film comprising three interconnected stories. The film was deliberately abrasive – structurally fragmented, tonally punishing, and resistant to the kind of narrative pleasure that had made Poor Things a crossover hit. It divided critics and underperformed commercially, but it served a crucial function in Stone’s trajectory: it demonstrated that her commitment to Lanthimos’s vision was not contingent on commercial outcomes.
This is an important distinction. Many actors cycle through auteur collaborations as a form of awards-season positioning – a calculated detour through difficult cinema before returning to safer ground. Stone’s partnership with Lanthimos has operated differently. Each film has demanded something distinct from her: the cold calculation of Abigail, the primal physicality of Bella, the emotional austerity of Kinds of Kindness. She has not repeated herself, and she has not retreated.
Bugonia: The Record-Breaker
Bugonia, released in October 2025, marked the pair’s fourth collaboration and their most commercially ambitious project to date, with a budget estimated at $45–55 million – Lanthimos’s most expensive film. An English-language remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 South Korean cult favourite Save the Green Planet!, the film cast Stone as Michelle Fuller, a pharmaceutical CEO kidnapped by two conspiracy-obsessed men (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis) who believe she is an alien intent on destroying Earth.
The film premiered at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival on 28 August 2025 and received four Oscar nominations at the 98th Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actress for Stone, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Score. Stone’s nominations – for acting and producing on the same film for the second time – made her the first woman to achieve that feat twice, and the youngest person to reach seven total nominations since Walt Disney in 1936.
The record itself is worth pausing on. Meryl Streep, the most nominated actor in Oscar history with twenty-one nods, had held the women’s record at seven nominations since 1988, when she was thirty-eight. Stone surpassed it at thirty-seven. She is not yet done. The sheer pace of her accumulation – seven nominations in a decade, two wins – places her in a category of sustained excellence that very few actors of any generation have matched.
The Other Work: Aster, McCary, and Strategic Range
It would be reductive to characterise Stone’s career solely through the Lanthimos lens, though the partnership has clearly been the defining creative axis of her maturity as an actor. In 2025, she also appeared in Eddington, Ari Aster’s satirical neo-Western about a small-town political standoff during the COVID-19 pandemic. Playing Louise, the emotionally fragile wife of Joaquin Phoenix’s sheriff, Stone worked within Aster’s characteristically anxious register to deliver a performance that critics described as darkly funny and unsettlingly precise. The film, which premiered at Cannes in May 2025, was a box-office disappointment – grossing only $13.7 million worldwide – but it reinforced Stone’s willingness to take secondary roles in films by directors she admires.
Meanwhile, through Fruit Tree, the production company she co-founded with her husband Dave McCary in 2020, Stone has been building a parallel career as a producer. Beyond Poor Things and Bugonia, she is developing The Catch, a romantic comedy directed by McCary and co-starring Chris Pine, with a release date set for 2027. She is also producing a Miss Piggy film alongside Jennifer Lawrence and Cole Escola – though she has been emphatic that she will not play the character herself. “Are you out of your mind? Miss Piggy is playing Miss Piggy,” she told Variety in January 2026.
What the Record Actually Means
The temptation with milestone narratives is to treat them as endpoints – as though the seventh Oscar nomination somehow completes a project. But Stone’s record is more interesting as a measure of a specific kind of career architecture. She has navigated the space between blockbuster franchise work (The Amazing Spider-Man, Cruella), auteur-driven art cinema (Lanthimos, Aster), and mainstream prestige (La La Land, The Help) with a strategic intelligence that few of her peers have matched.
What distinguishes her, finally, is not the quantity of nominations but the quality of the choices that produced them. Each Lanthimos film has been a genuine creative risk – not the safe, prestige-baiting kind, but the kind that might alienate audiences and box-office returns alike. That she has emerged from those risks with both critical recognition and commercial viability is a testament to the precision of her instincts and the depth of her collaborative commitments.
Stone once said of La La Land: “This is a film for dreamers, and I think that hope and creativity are two of the most important things in the world.” The quote has followed her for nearly a decade, but it reads differently now. She is no longer the dreamer. She is the architect – building, brick by brick, one of the most distinctive careers in contemporary cinema, and making it look, against all odds, like it was always meant to turn out this way.
Her next confirmed project, The Catch, will see her return to romantic comedy – the genre that first made her a star with Easy A in 2010. After four films with Lanthimos, it will be fascinating to see what she brings back from the other side.
For more on the films discussed here, see our review of Poor Things or browse our Film section.
