Emma Stone has denied calling Oscar host Jimmy Kimmel a “prick” after he joked about her movie Poor Things.
The 35-year-old actress won Best Actress at this year’s Academy Awards for her role as Bella Baxter in director Yorgos Lanthimos’ surreal comedy.
At the beginning of the night, after showing a short video compilation from the movie, Kimmel made the following joke, referring to the frequent sexual depictions in the movie:
These were all the parts of The Poor People that we were allowed to show on TV.
The footage showed Stone turning to say something to her husband Dave McCary, while fans later guessed that Stone mumbled the word “asshole”.
When asked by The Hollywood Reporter about that moment, Stone said the following:
No, no, no, no, no, no! I didn’t call him a prick.
What did I say? I didn’t call him a dick. I wasn’t mad at him at all. I’m gonna have to take this.
Stone’s co-star on the dark comedy series The Curse, Nathan Fielder, added that it was unlikely that Stone would react negatively to Kimmel’s remarks because she is “always open to a joke.”
Stone described himself as “virtually undisturbable”.
Fielder said that most players in Stone’s situation would be asking themselves the question:
Do I want to put myself in this situation? Do I want to do this?
Rather, Fielder said, Stone followed and trusted her instincts.
“When she hears something funny, she immediately says ‘Yes’,” the actor said.
He does not consult. He does not analyze. He knows what makes sense to him. I obsess about things, over-analyze things, whereas he is very confident and says, ‘Yes, that sounds funny. Let’s do it’.
In February, Stone responded to accusations that The Poor People was “sexist” and “exploitative” and that the sex scenes contained “disturbing” consent issues.
In the movie, Bella, who has the brain of an unborn baby implanted inside her head, enjoys her adult body and experiences her first orgasm on her journey of sexual discovery.
The film’s themes provoked strong reactions, with some claiming that the fact that it had a male director and therefore a male gaze made it sexist. There were also accusations that the nudity was exploitative and that Bella had consent issues because she had the brain of a child.
“If it helps, as the person who acted in and produced the movie, I never saw him as a child in any of those scenes,” Stone told The Times.
Stone later argued that the criticism of The Losers was a result of the way people consume movies these days and judge them on social media.
My mother has a saying, at the beginning of a relationship you say, ‘We are so in love that we finish each other’s sentences’.
Then, as time passes, it turns into ‘You always interrupt me’. This can also happen in a relationship with a movie, especially in a movie like this, which asks more questions than it answers.
