Emma Stone: She’s cool, she’s hot

MANILA, Philippines - You know you are going to have a great interview the minute the star walks in to the room. When Emma Stone was ushered into our suite, she had the disarming smile of a true and gracious Hollywood star.

“Hello, how are you doing?” she greeted our group of journalists inside the interview suite. “What are you guys going to ask me about?” she whispered conspiratorially to the delight of everyone.

If there’s a device to measure if one has made it big in Hollywood, then Emma will definitely shatter the scale to pieces. And she’s so cool about it she won’t even let you feel how hot she is in Hollywood these days when she talks to you. That’s the feeling this writer got when I had the chance to meet her and talk to her during the junket for Warner Bros.’ Gangster Squad in Los Angeles in December last year.

“It’s an overload, right?” Emma jokingly remarked when I asked her how she feels about the success that she is having lately. “It’s a little bit overkill!” she said before adding a joke that she later thought was inappropriate and asked to take back. “I can’t believe I’m saying it in front of microphones!” she exclaimed. “I’m sorry.”

The beautiful redhead, who made her feature film debut just less than six years ago, is now seemingly everywhere in Hollywood. When she’s not starring in big-budget movies like The Amazing Spider-Man and in Oscar-nominated movies like The Help or gracing the covers of nearly every fashion and entertainment magazine in the US (she graces the cover of this month’s Vanity Fair along with Ben Affleck and Bradley Cooper for the magazine’s annual Hollywood Hot List issue), she even makes the news just by appearing on television at 5 in the morning to announce the Oscar nominations! It’s proof of her status in the business when the Academy, in a break from tradition, taps her to help this year’s Oscar host Seth MacFarlane in breaking to the world the nominations to the most prized trophies in the entertainment world. Traditionally, only Oscar winners or previous nominees are asked to do the announcement.

“In all honesty, I am incredibly grateful for these opportunities and getting to work with people that I truly admire and getting to make choices, which is, for an actor, is like the dream, because usually you just take whatever comes to you,” she said with an earnestness in her voice when asked to describe her meteoric rise in the business.

“That’s been wonderful and, I know, won’t last forever at all. So, I really am so grateful at this point…” she added but instantly paused to mock herself again, “But I am so sick of my face!”

The seeming nonchalance and humility that Emma treats her fame is the reason why she has endeared herself to the press and to many actors and directors who are eager to work with her. The respect she commands is testament to her fine character. But, of course, it also helps when one is as drop-dead gorgeous as her!

And one of her admirers is her own director in Gangster Squad!

“Emma is not only one of the smartest, funniest actresses I’ve worked with, she’s also somebody you can’t take your eyes off of when she’s onscreen, and that kind of allure is really what this part called for,” director Ruben Fleischer stated in another interview.

The actress previously worked with Ruben in the movie Zombieland and in Gangster Squad, Emma is not only reuniting with her old director but she also gets to work with the handsome Ryan Gosling again with whom she has previously starred with to great acclaim in the hit romantic comedy Crazy, Stupid, Love.

“I really like working with Ryan so much, obviously,” she said excitedly.

And when asked to comment on why she shares such incredible chemistry with Ryan, Emma responded with a quick answer that caught all of us off-guard. “Who knows, maybe heaven? Maybe, it comes from heaven!” she said.

The room fell silent and she looked at all of us in the roundtable. After a couple of seconds, she smiled and laughed, “That was a joke. Come on, that was a joke.”

She acknowledged that she may share a certain chemistry with Ryan but she just couldn’t describe it. “It is like that in life with friends or family even — not like romantic chemistry, obviously, and hopefully — but there are certain people that you get along with on some level and others that you don’t.”

Their previous pairing produced one of the most memorable and oft-quoted scenes in recent movie history. And, although Emma and Ryan traded the contemporary elegance of Los Angeles in their last movie to the old Hollywood glamour of 1940s Los Angeles in Gangster Squad, their magical onscreen chemistry, the seduction and flirtation that the audiences loved are in full display again in their current movie.

“I have a great respect for her, maybe you could feel that,” Ryan told this writer when asked of his thoughts about Emma and their palpable screen chemistry. “It was difficult for us on this because we had done this comedy and that’s how we got to know each other — it’s all about finding the joke. You, kind of, make a fool out of yourself in front of that person in order to find it.”

Ryan revealed that the biggest challenge they had when they started work on Gangster Squad was that they both thought that the transition from doing comedy to drama “would be easy and then we have to be serious… We were trying to be like, you know, Bogart and Bacall — it was a whole other kettle of fish.”

Gangster Squad is a very different movie for both stars. It is based on a book of the same title and tells of a decade-long battle during the ’40s and the ’50s over control of the city of Los Angeles between the police and a group of gangsters and criminals, whose real-life leader, Mickey Cohen, is portrayed with usual aplomb by two-time Oscar winner Sean Penn. Emma portrays the lover of Sean’s criminal character while also having an affair with Ryan’s good cop character.

The movie is based on a true story but her character was a fictional part written to add layer to the drama and she described her as a wannabe actress who “moved out to Hollywood to be a star. Not an actress but a star,” who fell in love with the wrong man for the wrong reasons until she met the man with whom she falls madly in love with.

In real-life, Emma moved out to Hollywood to be an actress and a star. Today, she is both.

Gangster Squad is in theaters now.