When an actor focuses their career on partnerships, it can be difficult to avoid a kind of sameness. There’s often a homogeneity when one works with the same scene partner or director over and over again. Yet Emma Stone is known for her frequent collaborations, with filmmakers like Yorgos Lanthimos and actors like Jesse Plemons and Ryan Gosling, and she sports one of the most interesting careers in Hollywood.
Stone has proven herself capable of the impossible time and time again, whether it be making the audience fall in love with a monster like Cruella de Vil or making Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” even vaguely interesting in the 2000s. As an actor, she has taken the risk of the aforementioned sameness and instead turned her repeat collaborations into an opportunity for growth. With each role, she evolves, shifts, and develops her craft.
Here are the greatest Emma Stone performances. (So far, that is.)
10. “Bugonia” (2025)
The latest addition to Lanthimos’ filmography features a host of strong performances from its ensemble, leaning heavily on Plemons’ Teddy and newcomer Aidan Delbis’ Don while still giving Stone time to shine. Their lives become entangled after Teddy’s mother becomes terminally ill due to an experimental drug made by Michelle’s (Stone) company. Teddy and his cousin Don become overtaken by conspiracy theories, eventually going so far as to kidnap Michelle, who they believe to be an alien queen.
Lanthimos’ loose remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 dark comedy “Save the Green Planet!” sees Stone fully committed to the director’s dark, off-kilter tone, particularly when it comes to the perceived duality of her role (is she a human, or is she an alien?). Lanthimos and Stone’s comfort with each other is palpable, but “Bugonia” does give the Oscar winner less to work with than the rest of her best performances.
9. “Zombieland” (2009)
Ruben Fleischer reinvigorated the zombie genre in 2009, unleashing “Zombieland” and its 33 zany zombie survival rules. In the movie, an outbreak overtakes America when a strain of mad cow disease mutates into a zombie virus, leaving few survivors and even less trust in its wake. The cast includes Stone, Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, and Abigail Breslin, but “Zombieland” lives or dies by Harrelson and Stone’s performances as Tallahassee and Wichita, respectively. Stone’s patented brand of distrust and snark that served her so well in her 20s is on full display here.
8. “Kinds of Kindness” (2024)
While Lanthimos’ “Kinds of Kindness” can easily be described as an acquired taste, Stone’s three separate performances in it are undeniable. The film is a triptych anthology, featuring stories oh-so-loosely connected to one another. It’s perhaps the most misanthropic of the director’s filmography which, when coupled with the anthological storytelling, can be a touch grating. However, Stone’s performances as Rita, an overbooked disaster sent on a job she can’t quite complete; Liz, a marine biologist who went missing and returned with a few quirks; and Emily, a sex cultist, deliver an impressive range that, when paired with Plemons’ three characters, really sing. Stone is tasked not just with playing this range of characters, but ensuring that they pair perfectly with Plemons’ own weird swath of roles.
7. “Cruella” (2021)
“Cruella” shouldn’t have worked. The perpetual exhaustion of Disney’s live-action remakes, coupled with telling the origin of a woman who runs around in a dog-skin coat, should have rendered the project dead on arrival. But then the cast was announced, and then it looked wickedly stylish, and then the inconceivable happened… The film, directed by Craig Gillespie, told a compelling story.
Stone’s turn as Cruella is a delight, trading in both earnestness and an earned, bold brashness that highlights the misunderstood woman she was to become. It was an utterly impossible task, turning Cruella de Vil into a character that the audience could both care about and root for, and Stone is absolutely the only woman who could have pulled it off.
6. “The Help” (2011)
While a product of its time so far as acceptability of white savior stories are concerned, it’s nearly impossible to discuss Stone’s best performances without bringing up Skeeter Phelan. Tate Taylor’s period drama centers on two Black maids in the 1960s, Minny Jackson (Octavia Spencer) and Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis), and the white woman who seeks to tell their story, Stone’s Skeeter.
The film and the 2009 novel by Kathryn Stockett that it’s based on come with a fair share of baggage—including a lawsuit in which a woman whose name is alarmingly close to one of the characters alleges the author stole her likeness and story. But Spencer, Davis, and Stone all shine in their respective roles, with each performance elevating the next. Each character is intrinsically intertwined with the others, which means that the film relies not just on one woman delivering a knockout performance, but all three. Minny’s fire relies on the balance of Aibileen’s patience; and the story, as it exists, cannot be told in the form it takes here without Skeeter’s empathy toward not just Minny and Aibileen, but the Black perspective in the ’60s as a whole.
5. “La La Land” (2016)
It’s unclear if it’s possible to watch Stone’s performance in “La La Land” without bawling your eyes out. A romance on two fronts, tailor-made to devastate every part of you that struggles to reconcile dreams and true love, Damien Chazelle’s musical follows Stone’s Mia and Gosling’s Seb. The duo’s turn in 2011’s “Crazy Stupid Love” had already proven the actors’ chemistry, but they are singing an entirely different tune here, no pun intended. “La La Land” is less a story about choosing your career over your love life and more of an exploration of the question: What do you do when love isn’t enough? Gosling and Stone rise to that occasion in a perfect display of adoration, longing, and emotional destruction here. The result? Stone’s first Oscar win.
4. “Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)” (2014)
This film from Alejandro G. Iñárritu marks a transitional phase of sorts for Stone, where you see her onscreen snark start to evolve into something bolder and more odd. Her character, Sam, daughter to Michael Keaton’s Riggan, has all the trappings of her early career performances, while the film’s quirky tone and ambiguous ending introduce a proverbial springboard for the rest of her filmography. Stone doesn’t have a ton to do in “Birdman,” but it’s absolutely essential to charting her career evolution—something any aspiring performer should be interested in doing.
3. “The Favourite” (2018)
The third Lanthimos film on this list (and not the last), “The Favourite” feels like Stone fully leveling up. Turns out period dramas rooted in the politics of the rich can be extremely engaging if you make it weird and sexy, and that’s exactly what’s going on here. While Queen Anne’s (Olivia Colman) health falters, Lady Sara (Rachel Weisz) pulls all the strings in England. That is, of course, until Stone’s Abigail comes and ruins it all in the most delightfully messy way possible. Colman, Weisz, and Stone are clearly having an absolute blast playing off of each other during every second of this film, and Stone gets the opportunity to really showcase hilarious cruelty with political hunger and sexual desire.
2. “Easy A” (2010)
We love and respect teen girl romcoms in this house, especially when it comes to Will Gluck’s impeccable “Easy A”. And no, not just because it’s the hottest Stanley Tucci has ever been, thank you very much! It’s also because it’s pretty close to the best Stone has ever been. The film plays with the concept of Hawthorne’s 1850 novel “The Scarlet Letter,” but has no interest in directly adapting it. Instead, Olive (Stone) acts as a pretend sex worker, allowing boys at her school to claim that they slept with her in exchange for gift cards. There’s scandal, there’s drama, there’s bestie bitchiness—all anchored by a knockout performance by Stone. Additionally, if you didn’t get Natasha Bedingfield’s “Pocket Full of Sunshine” stuck in your head after reading this entry, it’s time for you to go rewatch “Easy A.”
1. “Poor Things” (2023)
If you’ve managed to go a day since 2023 without thinking of Stone’s delivery of “I must go punch that baby,” I might possibly accuse you of lacking whimsy. Stone’s Oscar-winning turn as Bella Baxter in Lanthimos’ “Poor Things” is far and away the best performance of her career. Watching her learn and develop as Bella—a dead woman brought back to life with the brain of a baby—is a gift in a million ways, particularly in how simply she illustrates feminist ideals in the most bitingly simple ways. “Poor Things” is a perfect amalgamation of every skill Stone has developed through her career, which is quite harmonious when you look at it alongside her character who we watch go from child to woman in such a short period. Stone has the opportunity to showcase her snark, obstinance, humor, earnestness, love and stone cold weirdness in the most beautiful ways here. Each line delivery hits exactly as it’s meant to, and each emotion hits as hard as she chooses. Stone always brings a level of surprise with each new role but, currently, it seems impossible that “Poor Things” will be topped any time soon.