Emma Stone gets chased, kidnapped, handcuffed, shaved and hosed in blood for Bugonia, her new absurdist black comedy film with director Yorgos Lanthimos.
But the Oscar-winning star revealed she found the role of hard-nosed CEO Michelle tough in an ‘unexpected’ way – and it wasn’t all physical.
In Bugonia, Stone’s pharmaceutical boss is abducted by conspiracy theorist and beekeeper Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his trusting cousin (Aidan Delbis), who believe she’s an alien sent to destroy Earth.
‘It was weirdly very physically challenging in a way I didn’t expect because I was like, I guess I’ll just be laying down a lot on a cot – but apparently, she’s a very physical gal!’ joked Stone when asked about the challenges of undertaking the role by Metro at the BFI London Film Festival gala screening on Friday night.
During the movie, Michelle is kept chained in their basement and subjected to some very bizarre – as well as very cruel – treatment, including having her hair shorn off, being covered in thick white paste and subjected to electric shocks.
But none of this physical discomfort proved a major challenge for the Poor Things and Eddington star, who said the biggest hurdle she had to overcome was actually in her performance as the character – who is quite a departure from roles she’s played before in terms of her hard and humourless edge – and how it would be received by audiences.
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‘I think [the biggest challenge was] just trying to weave her story so that it makes sense the second time as well!’ she shared.
She is joined once again in a Lanthimos movie by her Kinds of Kindness co-star Plemons, who displays his great talent for playing an intense and quiet psychopath with Teddy. We see him behave in truly horrendous ways but can’t help but feel for him still.
‘The thing you don’t want to do is make judgements but then there’s a certain level of objectivity that you also need, so it’s a delicate balance of getting inside something while also having – at least, at times – an overall sort of perspective,’ Plemons told Metro of how he connects with troubled roles like that of Teddy.
The Power of the Dog star continued: ‘It’s not to say that he didn’t do some very, very awful things. In his mind, we all have a story that we tell ourselves, and Teddy’s story that he told himself he believed to his core, but I think he just wanted desperately to be a hero and to help. There’s a line in the script that says, “I’m just trying to help”, and I believe that about him.’
‘It didn’t always come out in the most helpful way, but I think that was at the core of him, among other things,’ he added of the ‘in’ he found to relate with Teddy.
Bugonia’s cast also includes Alicia Silverstone as Teddy’s mother and was adapted by screenwriter Will Tracy from the 2003 South Korean black comedy horror thriller Save the Green Planet!
‘For me, I don’t really see the need to adapt anything with a lot of faithfulness because there’s no point in making a remake of essentially just the original film – so I like to start as fresh as I can, and take a pretty free hand and take the bits that I like or maybe just even take the premise, a few story beats, and then make something very new out of it so that both movies can stand on their own,’ Tracy said of his adaptation.
Tracy was attached to the project before either Lanthimos or Stone – who also produced it – and spoke about how they both helped it become ‘a fuller and richer experience than whatever I had on the page’.
He also spent the majority of the shoot on set, admitting he ‘didn’t know quite what to expect’ given the starry stature of his colleagues.
‘I had a paranoid fantasy as a writer that I’d show up and they’d just be throwing out script pages and making it all up as they went along because they were so brilliant, but it was not the case at all,’ Tracy laughed. ‘They treated [the text] quite respectfully, like a play, and were just really wonderful and gracious to me.’
Bugonia so far boasts a score of 92% on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes following its premiere at Venice Film Festival in August and first screening in London.
In my review out of Venice, I praised Bugonia as Stone and Lanthimos’ ‘boldest, oddest collaboration yet’ and observed: ‘It might be one of Lanthimos’s most normal-looking movies on the surface — and a remake, to boot – but don’t let that fool you into thinking he’s lost any of his unique edge.’
Bugonia screened as part of the 2025 London Film Festival and will release in UK cinemas on October 31.
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