Just because I don't have a college degree doesn't mean I am not smart!
Emma Stone
You know how sports teach kids teamwork and how to be strong and brave and confident? Improv was my sport. I learned how to not waffle and how to hold a conversation, how to take risks and actually be excited to fail.
I've never played someone where I felt it was beneficial to build from the outside in.
When I was 14 -years-old, I made this PowerPoint presentation, and I invited my parents into my room and gave them popcorn. It was called 'Project Hollywood 2004' and it worked. I moved to L.A. in January of 2004.
I used to spray tan a lot when I was a teenager. The last time I got spray-tanned was for the Golden Globes. And I was like, 'I love spray-tanning so much.' I still really like it. But it definitely makes me look like I have leprosy, after a point.
I have a friend who says that roles choose you at the time that you need them most, and you have to believe, as an actor, if you didn't get a part that you really, really wanted, and it went to someone else, it was because it was theirs to begin with.
The end of 'City Lights' makes me cry every time I see it - when Charlie Chaplin walks by the shop window and the once-blind girl brings him a flower and pins it to his lapel.
I mean, I haven't been around very long. I can't expect everyone to have seen 'The House Bunny'. Oh God. I am having such waves of internal embarrassment, which now I'm admitting on a tape recorder. This is so one of the things I should keep in my head.
I think the number one thing that I find important is the importance of honesty with your friends and your parents, if you can be. But I think that telling people how you really feel, being who you truly are, being safe and taking care of yourself is the most important thing.
I just live my life how I live as a person. I certainly am not, like, a saint or an angel by any means. I'm not anything like that. But I live just how I live. I mean, I have a little paranoia, but that's about it.
I'm not one of those shoppers where I go to a store and I'm like, trying it on, I'm not sure, 'Oh, can you put this on hold?' No. It's either love it or hate it. And it's the same way with scripts. I usually know within the first 10 pages. If I don't latch into it by then, then it's not going to happen.
Arizona is the worst place to spend the summer - it's like 125 degrees - so my mom, my brother and I would go to the beach for two months to escape the heat.
I was a good-looking kid. I never felt, like, dorky. I was just like, 'Yup, these are my braces. I've had them forever.'
I was raised in Arizona, and I went to public school, and the extent of my knowledge of the civil-rights movement was the story of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. I wonder how much my generation knows.
So anyway, I've learned a lot about myself just in terms of acting but just work ethic and interesting things like full-page monologues or talking straight into camera, which I had never gotten to do before.
I like to look like a person. It drives me crazy when you see women in movies playing teachers, and they have biceps. It totally takes me out of the movie. I start thinking, Wow, that actress playing this part really looks great!
The only movie I can watch on a loop, over and over, is 'Help', the Beatles movie. It's so funny and irreverent and great.
I always loved acting and improv and sketch comedy and theater, which I did at a local youth theater.
I'm a huge music fan. I usually say that if I had been born with a musical inclination, it would've been great. The Beatles changed everything for me, and I wanted to be a journalist for 'Rolling Stone.' I'm a big music fan in a Cameron Crowe way, kind of in a spectator way.
Drama is hard for me. Crying is much harder for me than laughter.
My favorite thing about movies is the ending, and so all my favorite movies have really great endings.
I was very lucky with the parents I was blessed with. I don't think it could have worked out any better. They've always been so understanding of me and understanding of what I want to do.
I really like grammar. And spelling. I was a spelling-bee kid. I'm hard-core about grammar.
Comedy's my first love. I love that so much. You play comedy in drama, too. The difference between genres doesn't really change the method of acting.
If I feel strongly about anything, I get overwhelmed with emotion.
I love improv. 'Crazy, Stupid, Love,' the script was really great, but the directors were open to letting you try different things. And that felt like a muscle I hadn't exercised in a really long time.
I'm shockingly terrible at action movies.
My parents are both very funny but they're also relatively soft-spoken, normal human beings while I'm just a lunatic. I don't know where this loud, ballsy, hammy ridiculousness came from. I'm just glad I followed my goals and my parents did too. It's not like we even had a plan when I dragged my mom to Los Angeles.
There's so much I'm interested in that I didn't discover in high school. For 'The Amazing Spider-Man', because Gwen is a scientist, we went to a lab in San Diego, and we were learning about biology. And I'm fascinated! Because I never went to biology class in high school.
I had massive anxiety as a child. I was in therapy. From 8 to 10, I was borderline agora-phobic. I could not leave my mom's side. I don't really have panic attacks anymore, but I had really bad anxiety.
Comedy was my sport. It taught me how to roll with the punches. Failure is the exact same as success when it comes to comedy because it just keeps coming. It never stops.
My life is PG-13 sometimes, and I really want Josh Grogan to propose to me, and he just won't do it.
You won't hear me saying I have no body issues because I wouldn't be human if I didn't.
I think there are plenty of soulmates out there. That's what I choose to believe.
I'd like to produce. I'd like to come up with ideas and collaborate with people and directors and writers that I like, be a part of movies that have the same idea that the movies that impacted me have. I'd like to be able to do that for people.
At first, when you go to premieres and award shows, you're thinking, 'How the hell am I here? All these people I've never met are here, and it's so cool!' And then, as time goes on, it's a little bit like, 'Ah... it's more like work.'
A lot of times, I feel like people come up to me because they think I'm like my character in 'Easy A', or because they've seen me in interviews, but really what they're a fan of is a movie or a character.
I had a trainer during 'Spiderman,' and I discovered I have deep-seated rage when I'm holding heavy weights over my head. Whatever dormant anger I have in me, that's where it comes out. That's not the kind of working out I want to do.
I used to do Facebook but you get a little too wrapped up in that stuff. Its more distracting than anything so I don't any more. I left it behind. I detoxed!
So one day, in a fit of trying to do something different, I just dyed my hair dark brown and got my first role a week later, after which I thought: 'People are closed-minded, man! Like a different hair colour changes everything!'
I think women should wear whatever makeup they want for themselves. Makeup should be fun.
The last thing in the world my parents would want to do is get on a stage or do a movie. They would probably rather die. But they let me be who I was, and they supported me.
The roles that have come into my life have taught me - and in that time period maybe I didn't even know it, but whatever came up or whatever it is that you have to express at that time, has benefitted me in a particular way.
When I look back, I don't have regrets. In the moment I am really, really hard on myself, I'm definitely my own worst critic and can be my own worst enemy, and I'm trying very hard not to be that.
I'm not very computer savvy.
I've read a lot of different versions of myself - and all of them are true because it's all opinion, and they're as accurate as it can ever be. But I don't think that I've been deft at hiding parts of my personality.
I just like to keep working and being able to pay my bills.
I'm actually the last person to ask about school. I kinda ducked out at 12, before all that stuff might have happened. I left school after sixth grade and was basically home-schooled after that.
I think 'Saturday Night Live', starting in the 1970s, really gave women an outlet to be funny. A lot of those women went on to have film careers, from Kristen Wiig now to Tina Fey and Gilda Radner.
He's my favorite! He wrote and produced, and starred in and cast all of his movies! Can you imagine? I get really excited when I talk about Charlie Chaplin.
