Yes, yes, yes, star and producer Emma Stone did indeed shave her head for her latest role in long-time collaborator Yorgos Lanthimos‘ latest film, “Bugonia.” After much chattering about the status of the Oscar winner’s seemingly clean-cut visage in the lead-up to the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival, once the camera (actually, four cameras) train themselves on Stone’s noggin during the film’s first act, there’s no doubt. Yes, this is real.
As IndieWire’s own Ryan Lattanzio noted in his review of the film from Venice, “Emma Stone actually shaved her head for the movie, appearing to do so on camera with commendable, unfazed dedication to the task.” But while Stone did undergo a big snip for the film, it didn’t come without some jitters on her part, as she explained during a recent screening of the film in New York City.
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In the film, Stone plays a high-powered CEO who just might be an alien sent to destroy Earth, or at least that’s what Jesse Plemons’ Teddy thinks (and why he kidnaps her in the Will Tracy-penned remake of “Save the Green Planet!”). On Wednesday evening in NYC, Stone, Lanthimos, and Tracy took the stage for a post-screening Q&A to chat about the film with Patti Smith, who had plenty of queries about the film’s making, including the one-take-only head-shaving.
“From the moment I read the script, I knew I’d have to shave my head, because there was just never going to be any other way,” Stone said, when asked about how she prepared for the key scene.
“You did have cold feet once,” Lanthimos added. “Right before!,” Stone said. “It was a year and a half I knew that I was going to be shaving my head, and then the day of — they were setting up four cameras, because we had to get it in one shot and we were shooting on VistaVision for the most part, which is a gorgeous but very moody camera that will shut down a lot — so they were setting up, and it was taking a long time to set all the cameras up. And I just started kind of panicking about that.”
Stone said that a conversation with Lanthimos helped ease matters, but what “really brought her back to Earth” was something a bit more personal. “My mom went through chemo, like, she did something legitimately hard and she lost her hair. And the first thing she said was, ‘I am so jealous, I want to shave my head again,’” Stone shared. “And I was like, 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.’ So it was actually one of the greatest experiences of my life, very freeing, and it’s just hair. I thought it would be longer by now, but it’s just hair!”
Focus Features will release “Bugonia” in select theaters on Friday, October 24 and widely on Friday, October 31.
