Emma Stone Demanded Nude Scene in Her New Movie
by EG
Emma Stone wasn't pressured into doing a nude scene in The Favourite. In fact, it was her idea to be topless in the scene, because she felt that it made the scene better. Read on for details.
Rachel Weisz has a few choice words about the c-word. She's just slid into a chair at an Italian restaurant in New York's East Village ā not far from where she lives with husband Daniel Craig and their new baby girl ā and she couldn't seem more like a picture-perfect new mum. Casually yet fashionably attired in a slouchy gray sweater, leggings and sneakers, she's elegant and down-to-earth at the same time. But then she starts dropping C-bombs.
"In England, we say it all the time," admits Weisz, 48, nonchalantly. "If I'm with another Brit, we'll say, 'So and so is being such a cāt,' and laugh. It's an old English word. Shakespeare used it. Or maybe Chaucer." The London-born Oscar winner (for supporting actress in 2005's The Constant Gardener) forks into a plate of kale salad, pausing when she notices my expression. "Why, does that word bother you?"
Of course, in America that word is no laughing matter. On this side of the Atlantic, it may be the second-most-offensive slur in the book (just ask feckless Samantha Bee). But in The Favourite, Fox Searchlight's $15 million period piece rolling into theaters like a post-feminist grenade Nov. 23 (and going wide to about 600 theaters nationwide in December), just about everybody ā including co-stars Emma Stone and Olivia Colman ā is slinging the obscenity, as well as a slew of other eyebrow-raising idioms. And that's hardly the only thing about the movie that's upending the corset genre.
Perfectly timed for the mixed-up zeitgeist of the #MeToo era ā with women making historic gains in the midterms as the U.S. president regularly flings sexist insults like "horse face" ā this female-fronted absurdist period piece about a power struggle in 18th century England already is being buzzed about as an awards race, um, favorite.
"I had the sheet up around me," recalls Stone of the moment she decided to bare her breasts for the camera for the first time in her career. "And as we were shooting it and we did a few takes, I said, 'Can I please just be [naked]?' I think it's going to give Sarah something to look at when she sees that I'm not just under the sheet covered up. Olivia was like, 'No, don't do it!' Yorgos was like, 'Are you sure that's what you want to do?' And I was like, 'Absolutely.' I chose to do it. I was like, this makes sense to me. It's an absolute [Stone flips the bird] to Sarah."
Get the rest of the story at The Hollywood Reporter.
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