(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sat 14 February 2026 3:00, UK
Many actors refuse to watch their own movies, not wanting to be confronted by the unyielding nature of their own performance, forever frozen in time and immortalised in celluloid.
It took a while for two-time Oscar winner Emma Stone to watch her own movies, but I guess when you’ve racked up so much success, you get pretty confident in your abilities, no longer feeling the need to hide your head in shame, especially if you can say you’ve been in acclaimed movies like La La Land, Poor Things, The Favourite, and Bugonia.
Stone had her sights set on being a star from a young age, making her film debut in the beloved 2007 classic Superbad, subsequently honing her comedic prowess by often starring in romantic slices of humour, like Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, Easy A, and Friends with Benefits, which helped to put her on the map.
However, she wasn’t able to sit down and watch any of them for a while, especially 2010’s Crazy, Stupid, Love, which marked one of Stone’s final turns in a rom-com before she lent herself to some larger projects, like the Spider-Man series, period drama The Help, and Birdman, which earned the actor her first Oscar nomination.
Directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, the movie was one of several collaborations between her and Ryan Gosling that was pretty well-received, yet Stone wanted it to be perfect, so much so, she believes she just put too much “pressure” on herself, and now she refuses to glance at it.
Starring alongside a pretty stacked cast of actors like Steve Carell, Julianne Moore, Kevin Bacon, and Marisa Tomei, she was in safe hands but still unsure that she knew exactly what she was doing. “I was really in love with that script, but I put so much pressure on myself. I was 20, and while we were shooting it, I was just going nuts and was like, this whole thing could fail,” she explained to Variety.
The film was written by Dan Fogelman, who had previously penned hits like Cars and Tangled, so she didn’t need to worry, though at the end of the day, Stone was young and she didn’t have as much confidence in her abilities as she does now, notwithstanding that she’d led Easy A just a year before.
“It felt like it had to be well-calibrated throughout, and it was the first time that I ever had to rely on myself to be able to carry all of that,” the actor said, but when asked by Timothée Chalamet about how she felt after actually watching the movie, she replied, “I haven’t seen it.”
This led her to ask, “Can you watch your stuff?” revealing that she “can now”, so perhaps one day she’ll sit down and watch Crazy, Stupid, Love and realise that she had nothing to worry about, even if she did soon go onto projects that were much more impressive.