Emma Stone’s best performances, ranked

Yorgos Lanthimos’s fizzingly rude Frankenstein period romp captures the full range of Stone’s talents like an elixir in a scientist’s vial. Her physical comedy skills are almost Chaplin-esque as her reanimated Victorian woman, Bella Baxter, attempts to master her new body, while her deadpan comic timing is instinctive when Baxter embarks on a coming-of-age picaresque around Europe’s fleshpots. It’d only work with the most wholehearted performance, and Stone has you rooting for Bella from the first scene. She may have rued beating Lily Gladstone to that Best Actress Oscar, but it was hardly undeserved.

Stone had played paramour to Ryan Gosling twice before, in Crazy, Stupid, Love and retro-pulpy misfire Gangster Squad, but here is where they made magic. Damien Chazelle’s modern musical deals in both the lightheaded fantasy and harsh reality of trying to make it in Los Angeles, with Gosling as an aspiring jazz musician and Stone as a struggling actress who gradually realise they can make their dreams come true, but not together. The film’s wild success is built upon their chemistry, but Stone stands out, bringing heartbreaking vulnerability to a role that’d earn her Oscar No 1.

Stone kicked off a potentially career-defining collaboration with Lanthimos in this magnificent, cockeyed period piece in which she plays real-life aristocrat Abigail Masham who vies with her cousin (Rachel Weisz) for the affections of the capricious Queen Anne (Olivia Colman). As with Poor Things, she cuts a butter-won’t-melt innocence with a scheming side a mile wide. It doesn’t spare her an array of indignities as she attempts to climb from the scullery to the Queen’s chamber. Her clipped English accent represents the beginning of another key team-up – with dialect coach Neil Swain. 

Stone had been charming in underwritten roles for three years before landing her first lead, and instantly proved those flashes of star presence weren’t false. The surface-level comparisons to Lindsay Lohan had always been there, but in this comic sorta-retelling of The Scarlet Letter, she goes full Mean Girls, showing major sass and smarts as a bookish high schooler who leans into false rumours about her promiscuity. It set her career on the trajectory Lohan’s could have had, but really, Stone’s natural likeability was always going to elevate her – few in Hollywood can match it.

Reuniting with her Easy A co-star Steve Carell, Stone cuts a pugnaciously determined figure as tennis star Billie Jean King who, in 1973, was challenged by journeyman player Bobby Riggs (Carell) to an on-court ‘battle of the sexes’. Chauvinism lost in straight sets and King found love along the way, with hairdresser Marilyn Barnett (Andrea Riseborough). Gifted and tough, dogged and almost studiedly unfashionable, King draws a different kind of performance from Stone. A lookalike pro played the tennis shots for her, but the actress’s fired-up turn commands the screen off-court.

It feels like about two decades and seven Spider-Men ago that Andrew Garfield was donning the Spidey suit for the first time and webslinging his way into this beloved franchise. At the time, it felt fresh, at least partly because of Stone’s endless charm as Peter Parker’s high-school sweetheart Gwen Stacy, not to mention her ability to strike up an easy chemistry with co-stars. Stone, who was rumoured to have pipped Mia Wasikowska to the role, and Garfield make a ridiculously likeable Peter-Gwen combo – their scenes give this superhero reboot the quirky good vibes of a romcom.

Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling were MVPs at this year’s Oscars, and it’d be nice to think that their natural affinity began on the set of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s charming, high-EQ romcom. Stone is a law student struggling with romance and Gosling is the lothario she jousts with in a series of flirty, screwball-flavoured encounters. As La La Land would later prove, there’s so much chemistry between the pair, they almost have to work to suppress it at times. Stone’s way with quotable dialogue is on full display, too. ‘Seriously?!’ she pretend-barks at Gosling’s improbably perfect abs. ‘It’s like you’re Photoshopped.’

In which Stone plays the manic pixie conwoman to Jesse Eisenberg’s nerdy survivalist, using her wits, looks and lack of conscience to stay alive (and provide for her little sister, Abigail Breslin) post-zombie apocalypse. The role isn’t fleshed out enough to count as her true breakthrough, but it’s a wonder she hasn’t been tasked to portray a hardened femme fatale more often, because she’s darn good at it, imbuing this zany zom-com with genuine tough-ass ‘tude.  

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Best Picture-winner about an actor in freefall was polarising, with some regarding it as pretentiously showy. But there’s no denying that Stone’s performance as the cynical, aggrieved daughter of Michael Keaton’s washed-up former movie star is one of its true highlights. Fresh out of rehab, in ripped jeans and peroxide-blonde hair, she is viciously funny, but also just plain vicious – particularly when it comes time to give her dad a reality check with a shouted monologue that helped earn her a Best Supporting Actress nomination.

Reinventing dog-bothering Disney villain Cruella de Vil in an origin story that puts some of the blame for her dark arc on – checks notes – the dogs didn’t sound like the best idea at the time. But if anyone can bring real pedigree to a potential mutt’s meal it’s Stone. She imbues her character, a fashion designer savant, with the punk spirit of Vivienne Westwood and the anarchic energy of the Joker to enjoyable effect. It’s not the most essential film on her CV, but she makes it throwaway fun.