In January 2026, when the ninety-eighth Academy Awards nominations were announced, Emma Stone collected two more – Best Actress and Best Picture as a producer – for Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia. The 37-year-old from Scottsdale, Arizona, had just become the youngest woman in Oscar history to reach seven career nominations, surpassing a record held by Meryl Streep since 1988. Only Walt Disney, who hit seven at age 34 in 1936, got there younger. The achievement crystallised something that has been building for nearly a decade: Stone is no longer merely a talented comedic actress who struck gold in La La Land. She is now one of the most reliably excellent performers in English-language cinema, and her creative marriage with a Greek auteur who once made a film about imprisoned children has become one of the defining collaborations of the century.
From Comedy ingénue to Lanthimos muse
The partnership was not, by any conventional logic, inevitable. Before 2018, Stone’s career followed a well-trodden Hollywood arc: a scene-stealing turn in Superbad (2007), a star-making lead in Easy A (2010), franchise work as Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spider-Man films, and a first Oscar nomination for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman (2014). She won Best Actress for La La Land in 2017, cementing her status as a bankable A-lister. The typical next step would have been another prestige musical or an awards-bait drama.
Instead, Stone chose Yorgos Lanthimos. The director of Dogtooth and The Lobster cast her as the scheming Abigail Hill in The Favourite (2018), and the result – a performance of coiled malice masked by curtsied deference – earned Stone a second Oscar nomination, this time for Best Supporting Actress. As the New Yorker critic Richard Brody noted at the time, Stone “revealed a range and a daring that her previous, mostly comedic work had only hinted at.” More importantly, the actress and the director discovered something in each other.
“We have something that I can’t explain, and I’m so grateful for,” Stone told Now To Love during the Poor Things press cycle. Lanthimos, characteristically deadpan, has been equally succinct: “I’ll do anything with her.” She has responded in kind, telling Dazed: “I’ll do anything with Yorgos.”
That mutual commitment has produced four features – The Favourite, Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness (2024), and Bugonia (2025) – plus a short film, Bleat (2022). Stone has gone from Lanthimos’s most unlikely collaborator to his indispensable one.
The Oscar machine
The numbers are staggering. Stone’s seven nominations span Best Supporting Actress (Birdman, The Favourite), Best Actress (La La Land, Poor Things, Bugonia), and Best Picture as a producer (Poor Things, Bugonia). She has won twice – for La La Land and Poor Things – placing her alongside Katharine Hepburn, Frances McDormand, and Meryl Streep as one of only four women to win Best Actress at least twice. She is also the first woman to be nominated for both acting and producing on the same film twice, having achieved the feat for both Poor Things and Bugonia.
The producing credits are not vanity additions. Stone launched her production company, Fruit Tree, with her husband Dave McCary. The banner has produced Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow (2024) and Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain (2024), both A24 releases – giving Stone the ability to shape projects from inception rather than simply showing up to perform.
This dual role – actor and producer – has accelerated her awards trajectory in a way that few could have predicted. At the 2026 ceremony, Bugonia received four nominations total: Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Score. The film’s 87 per cent Rotten Tomatoes score confirmed that it was not merely an awards vehicle but a genuine critical success.
Shaving her head – and the tears before the take
For Bugonia, Stone went further than she had for any previous role. In the film – a remake of the 2003 South Korean black comedy Save the Green Planet! – she plays Michelle Fuller, the CEO of a pharmaceutical conglomerate who is kidnapped by two conspiracy theorists (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis) who believe she is an alien intent on destroying Earth. The script required her captors to shave her head on camera.
Stone knew about the scene for a year and a half before filming. She told Vogue‘s September 2025 issue that she “burst into tears in her trailer” on the day, partly because of her mother, Krista, who was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer in 2008 and had to shave her own head during treatment. “She actually did something brave,” Stone said of her mother. “I’m just shaving my head.” Krista, who has been cancer-free for 12 years, later told her daughter she was “jealous” and wanted to shave her head again.
The scene was filmed in one take, with four cameras rolling. Plemons recalled the tension: “It was like, ‘Here we go – Emily has shaved her head.’ We better make this good!” Stone used a 1.5-millimetre blade. Afterward, she told the audience at a New York screening in September 2025: “I’m shaving my head because I get to do what I love, and my mom was there with me, and I was like, ‘What a gift! It’s hair.’ It was actually one of the greatest experiences of my life.”
The Curse and the television detour
Between Poor Things and Bugonia, Stone took a calculated detour into long-form television. The Curse, created by Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie, premiered on Showtime in November 2023 and ran for ten episodes. Stone played Whitney Siegel, one half of a newlywed couple attempting to develop an eco-conscious housing development in Española, New Mexico, while starring in a fictional HGTV programme. The series – a collaboration with A24 – was a masterpiece of sustained discomfort, with a 93 per cent Rotten Tomatoes critics’ score.
The IndieWire critic Ben Travers called it “an exquisite, excruciating black comic wonder.” Stone’s performance – all nervous energy, performative guilt, and mounting paranoia – demonstrated a commitment to discomfort that her film work with Lanthimos had prepared audiences for but that television audiences had not previously seen from her. The show was a limited series with no plans for a second season, and its surreal final episode became one of the most discussed television events of 2024.
Crucially, The Curse proved that Stone’s range extended well beyond Lanthimos’s particular brand of absurdist satire. Working with Fielder’s excruciating cringe comedy and Safdie’s kinetic intensity, she demonstrated an ability to inhabit an entirely different register of discomfort. It was a reminder that her talent was never dependent on any single director.
Eddington – working outside the Lanthimos orbit
In 2025, Stone took a supporting role in Ari Aster’s Eddington, a satirical neo-Western set during the COVID-19 pandemic. The film, which premiered at Cannes before its A24 theatrical release, starred Joaquin Phoenix as a pandemic-sceptic sheriff running for mayor against Pedro Pascal’s incumbent. Stone played Louise Cross, the sheriff’s emotionally unstable wife.
Eddington grossed only $13.7 million worldwide against a $25 million budget, but the role underscored Stone’s willingness to take supporting parts in ambitious projects by directors she admires. Having worked with Iñárritu, Chazelle, Lanthimos, Fielder, Safdie, and now Aster, she has built a filmography that reads less like a typical Hollywood career and more like a curated survey of contemporary auteur cinema.
Bugonia itself was not a box office smash – it earned $43.7 million worldwide against an estimated $45–55 million budget – but its commercial underperformance has not derailed Stone’s standing. The comparison is not with Tom Cruise or Dwayne Johnson but with Cate Blanchett or Daniel Day-Lewis: performers whose careers are measured in nominations and artistic credibility rather than per-screen averages.
What comes next
Stone’s slate over the coming years is characteristically eclectic. She will star in The Catch, a romantic comedy directed by her husband Dave McCary for Universal Pictures, with Chris Pine in talks to co-star. The project represents a return to the genre where Stone first made her name, albeit with a significantly different power dynamic now that she is producing as well as starring.
She is also attached to produce, alongside Jennifer Lawrence, an untitled Miss Piggy movie for which Cole Escola is writing the script – the kind of left-field producing choice that has become Stone’s hallmark through Fruit Tree.
And then there is the question of Lanthimos. The director’s next film is not yet confirmed, but given that Stone has appeared in every one of his projects since The Favourite, the assumption is that the partnership will continue. “It’s easier in that we have a shorthand,” Stone told Dazed in 2024. “But it’s harder in the sense that we want to find new realms and ways of doing things.” After a pause, she corrected herself: “That’s not harder. It’s easier. It just gets better.”
The record that matters
Meryl Streep’s seven nominations at age 38 stood for nearly four decades. Stone surpassed it at 37, and she shows no sign of slowing down. The record is not merely a statistical curiosity; it reflects a career that has been managed with extraordinary strategic intelligence. Stone has chosen directors who challenge her, roles that subvert audience expectations, and producing projects that expand her creative footprint. She has avoided franchise commitment after Spider-Man, turned down safe commercial bets in favour of risky auteur work, and built a production company that generates its own pipeline of material.
In an industry where actresses over 35 routinely report a thinning of available roles, Stone has done the opposite: her most interesting work has come since she turned 30. The Favourite, Poor Things, The Curse, Bugonia – each has pushed her into territory that her earlier, lighter work only hinted at. The youngest woman to seven Oscar nominations is not done yet. At 37, with a romantic comedy, a Muppet film, and an inevitable next Lanthimos collaboration on the horizon, Emma Stone’s career is less a trajectory than an expanding constellation – each new project a star added to a map that is still being drawn.
For more on Stone’s Oscar-winning performance in Poor Things, see our in-depth review. For context on the awards landscape, our coverage of the Golden Globe Awards 2025 traces the season’s key moments.
