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Emma Stone in Easy ATimes sure change.

Back in 17th-century Massachusetts, a single act of promiscuity could ruin a woman’s reputation for life. Today, a smart girl can get as much positive as negative notoriety from sexualizing her image.

Emma Stone is a smart girl. And that's exactly what she does in her new movie Easy A, playing an unpopular and overlooked teenager, Olive Penderghast, who becomes quite a sensation at her California high school after faking a libidinous romp with a gay friend (Dan Byrd) who’s not ready to come out of the closet. But even in this Rihanna/Lady Gaga age, Olive discovers, there's a price to be paid whether you’ve actually Done It or not.

“She kind of turns it to her advantage and uses what goes on to improve her social standing,” Stone, 21, explains during an interview on the Santa Monica Pier. “What really interests me is the genuine sadness that underlines a lot of the humour. But it's very much a comedy, not tragic drama.”

Amanda Bynes and Emma Stone
Are you looking at me? Amanda Bynes (left) gives Emma Stone a dirty look in Easy A

Stone emphasizes the film's humour to offset the idea, which is reinforced by references in its own trailers, that Easy A is some kind of updated dramatization of Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic, not-funny-at-all novel of Puritan-era intolerance, The Scarlet Letter. In the film, Olive is studying the book, and even gets a provocative fashion notion out of it.

“There are some As on the wardrobe,” Stone admits, referencing the mark of shame that the novel’s heroine, Hester Prynne, is forced to wear to signify “adulterer.” A big difference in the movie is that Olive simply opts, as the modern phrase goes, to own it.

“People are describing it as a takeoff of The Scarlet Letter, but it’s really not,” Stone continues. “It’s the story of a girl in high school who gets a rumour started about her and she decides to go with it. She’s reading The Scarlet Letter and sees her life mirroring Hester Prynne’s in the sense that she’s being ostracized by her classmates. But the story is in no way based on The Scarlet Letter.”

More important to Stone will be the box-office’s judgment of Easy A. It marks her first attempt to carry a movie after notable successes in the ensemble hits Superbad, The House Bunny and Zombieland. She doesn’t seem too concerned, and shouldn’t be. After all, Easy A earned a coveted spot at this month’s Toronto International Film Festival. And she’s already got a string of high-profile projects lined up, such as Crazy, Stupid, Love with Steve Carell and Julianne Moore, and the adaptation of the bestseller The Help.

Raised in Arizona, in a major nerd move, Stone gave her golf course-owning parents a PowerPoint presentation on why it would be okay to let her move to Hollywood and pursue her dream. And she appears to be refreshingly neurosis-free when it comes to the type of career concerns that plague most actors.

“I just always wanted to play someone else,” she says with a shrug. “I don’t know why, I just can’t remember ever wanting to do anything else. And it still makes me happy, so I’m going to keep doing it until it doesn’t anymore — and, hopefully, that won’t happen.”

Emma Stone and Penn Badgely
Stone goofs around with hottie Penn Badgley.

Given a choice, she’d prefer to work more in an Easy A than Scarlet Letter vein. “I always wanted to be on Saturday Night Live,” Stone says. “That was my jumping-off point; Gilda Radner was my hero as I was growing up. I always connected comedy to love and joy. My parents watched a lot of comedies and showed me a lot of them; like, I think The Jerk was the first movie that I ever saw. Then when you get into John Hughes and Woody Allen and Hal Ashby, the comedy mixing with something that’s very heartfelt and true, that’s where I’ve been drawn more as I’ve gotten older.”

Of course, the passage of centuries doesn’t change some aspects of human nature. When it comes to intense community judgment of inappropriate behaviour, Lindsay Lohan is arguably the real internet-age incarnation of Hester Prynne.

With her physical resemblance to Lohan, husky voice and alternating blond and red hair, when asked if anyone’s ever compared her to the troubled LiLo, Stone laughs and says, “Yeah, I think probably.”

But don’t expect Stone to have anything to be ashamed of anytime soon. “I just keep my head down,” she says. “I like to hang out with my friends and enjoy what I get to do for my job, but I definitely don’t fall into what I guess you’d call the lifestyle that it offers. I’d rather remain as normal as possible. As long as all it says on the internet about me is I do PowerPoint, that’s enough for me.”

Bob Strauss lives in L.A. where he writes about movies and filmmakers.



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