Playing a high-powered CEO who may also be an undercover alien is tough work.
Just ask Emma Stone, who plays such a character in director Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia. In the absurdist black comedy, Stone stars as Michelle Fuller, the powerful CEO of pharmaceutical company Auxolith, who is kidnapped by Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a conspiracy theorist convinced that Michelle is really an Andromedan — an extraterrestrial sent to Earth to destroy it.
After ambushing Fuller at her mansion, Teddy and his accomplice/cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) knock her unconscious with a tranquilizer and load her into the backseat of her own car. But before they can drive her back to their home and chain her up in the basement, they have to shave off her hair, which they believe is really a communication device she can use to contact her mothership. So, Don handles the electric clippers in the backseat while Teddy speeds away from the crime scene.
Asked what was going through her mind as her costar removed her signature red locks, Stone tells Entertainment Weekly, “Stay still. That was it. I was meditating on stay still, just stay still.”
Since the scene had to be filmed in one take, the star says she was “so afraid” that she’d accidentally ruin the moment by opening her eyes or flinching. “Because I am not awake there, I was like, play dead, basically, play dead,” she says.
If anything went wrong with the take, Stone says there was no backup plan. “It was one take and there were four cameras set up just to make sure,” she says. Luckily, they got the moment in one shot, and Lanthimos credits his star with being on board with the major makeover from the beginning.
“Not difficult at all, really,” he says when asked if it was hard convincing Stone to shave her head. “I mean, it was in the script, so I didn’t even have to tell her. She read it first, and she had the slightest hesitation just before, not hesitation to do it, but she had kind of a knot in her stomach. But it happened. Thankfully, we did it. We only had one shot to achieve it. And then she felt great. She saw herself and she really loved it, and she felt very free.”
In fact, Lanthimos thought his star looked so “amazing” with the new ‘do, he even tried to convince her to keep it. “But she wouldn’t have it,” he says. “She had enough of [dealing with] months of having to also hide her head while we were filming.”
Still, a shaved head wasn’t the only obstacle Stone had to deal with thanks to Teddy’s bizarre beliefs. After removing Fuller’s “communication device,” her kidnapper next endeavors to dull her alien powers by… regularly applying thick layers of lotion over her body.
“It was a combination of [creams] and there were many tests of all different ones because it goes through all different layers,” Stone explains of the process. “And turns out human skin hovers around 98.6 degrees, and that’s a melting point for a lot of creams. So making that stuff last all day — tricky. The pores take it in, it thins out. So it was a combination of things, depending on the day, different foundations, moisturizers. It was a fun test, though.”
Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features
Stone credits hair and make-up designer Torsten Witte with doing “God’s work” in nailing the concoction, which she had to slather on every day for “months.” “Until it transitioned to blood,” she teases. “Yeah. It was either cream or blood.”
Physical discomforts aside, Stone says she was immediately fascinated by her character. “It feels truly like [Teddy and Michelle] are two heroes unto themselves that are both here to save the world in completely different ways and from completely different backgrounds clearly, and from totally different viewpoints that have this tension against each other, but could really teach each other a couple of things potentially if they were able to hear each other or if it was a circumstance that wasn’t so kidnap-y,” she says.
Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features
“I found her so fascinating because she’s sort of glaze-y, everything’s lovely and everything’s fine, but it’s all just an empty word salad-y exercise,” she continues. “It is always interesting to me to hear people who are the heads of these companies that are like, We need to say this specific set of things. And her using those tactics to then negotiate with Teddy in this really intense situation in a basement – I found it really, really funny and sad, and it was just true in so many ways.”
Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.
Bugonia hits theaters everywhere on Friday.
