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Emma Stone sits down with WSJ Magazine to answer several questions, including ‘Bradley Cooper or Ryan Gosling?’

TUCKED INTO A CORNER booth at a seafood restaurant off the Pacific Coast Highway,

listens attentively as a waiter with a handlebar mustache describes the evening’s specials: bluenose sea bass, whole branzino, grilled market-price lobster, fresh sea urchin, shellfish stew made with mussels and clams gathered from the ocean we can see out the window. Maybe it’s the candles, but Stone’s green eyes look even bigger than usual as she nods enthusiastically, taking it all in. Then the waiter turns to leave, and the 26-year-old actress lets the facade drop. “I was concentrating so hard on making my face look like I was listening that I totally forgot to listen,” she confesses. “I wasn’t listening at all!”

We’ve just met, but this feels like a very Emma Stone moment. The self-effacement, the goofiness, the slapstick laugh. Stone is a famous person who is very good at not seeming famous. It’s the kind of loose-limbed naturalism that has allowed America to fall for her, starting with her breakout role in 2007’s

Stone lives not far from here, in a half-furnished rental house she’s sharing with her younger brother and Ren, a three-and-a-half-year-old golden retriever–Irish setter mix. She used to live in L.A.—six years ago, in West Hollywood—and recently relocated back from New York. “It feels different being by the water,” she says. “You’d be surprised at how much of life can be taken up by doing yoga and nothing.”

If that sounds a bit lackadaisical, Stone is coming off a very busy year. Last summer she shot a

which opens this July—and then went straight into rehearsals for a three-month stint on Broadway, starring as a coked-up Sally Bowles in

Then came Academy Awards season, which she experienced for the first time as a nominee, and then

40th anniversary special, on which the longtime comedy nerd got to fulfill a childhood fantasy by playing Roseanne Roseannadanna, a character originated by one of her heroes, Gilda Radner. (“It wasn’t great,” Stone says of her performance, “but it was fun.”) When her run on

ended in February, Stone high-tailed it to California, where she had reshoots on

a Cameron Crowe movie that opened in May, in which she plays an Air Force F-22 fighter pilot and Bradley Cooper’s love interest. (Crowe calls her “the soul of the movie.”) Now she finally has a couple of months off, which she’s using to relax and ponder the little questions, like what to do with the rest of her career. “I was actually on the phone all day today, trying to put the pieces together,” she says. “When I sit in my house for too long, I think too much—but I really like sitting in my house.”

THINKING AHEAD | Irrational Man, out this July, marks the second time Emma Stone has appeared in a film by Woody Allen. Trademark silk turtleneck, $328, Trademark Grand Street, New York, The Elder Statesman cashmere blanket scarf, $2,010, and The Elder Statesman, West Hollywood

Photo: Photography by Angelo Pennetta for WSJ. Magazine, Styling by Francesca Burns

Stone orders a dozen oysters and a glass of Sancerre, and warns that she can sometimes make interviews tricky. She’s constantly second-guessing herself, wondering how things might look in print, worrying she might change her mind in two hours. “That’s my problem—I just go 20 steps ahead,” she says. On the other hand, her aversion to insincerity and artifice can make for some delightful moments—like the time she was doing a junket for a mascara launch and answered a question about beauty advice with a story about how she’d recently seen the catacombs in Paris and was struck by the thought that we’d all be bones someday. “Everyone at the table, all these 25-year-old women who worked at beauty websites, were just jaws-open horrified,” Stone recalls, laughing. “But it’s true! We’re all going to die, and we’re not going to have faces anymore. So do what you want with your face, because it will be a skull pretty soon.”

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The waiter returns with the oysters, and as he sets them down, he gets a little flustered (not unusual in Stone’s presence). “Sorry,” he says, nodding at the glowing red light on the table. “That tape recorder is getting to me.” Stone looks up and smiles. “I know!” she says. “I’m the same way!”

AS A GIRL IN SCOTTSDALE, Arizona, Emily Jean Stone was a spelling-bee champion with recurring acne who lived on the 16th hole of a golf course. (“Wikipedia says my parents owned the course, but that’s not true.”) She was anxious and suffered panic attacks. “It was really bad,” she says. “The first time I had a panic attack I was sitting in my friend’s house, and I thought the house was burning down. I called my mom and she brought me home, and for the next three years it just would not stop. I would go to the nurse at lunch most days and just wring my hands. I would ask my mom to tell me exactly how the day was going to be, then ask again 30 seconds later. I just needed to know that no one was going to die and nothing was going to change.”

Stone’s parents took her to a therapist, but what really helped was when she started acting at a local youth theater. The thing that would induce anxiety in most people—performing onstage in front of hundreds of strangers—for her helped ease it. “There’s something about the immediacy of acting,” Stone says. “You can’t afford to think about a million other things. You have to think about the task at hand. Acting forces me to sort of be like a Zen master: What is happening right in this moment?”

When she was 14, Stone—a computer geek who had already published her own HTML e-newsletter—created a PowerPoint presentation to try to persuade her parents to let her move to Hollywood. It worked: She got an apartment with her mom in L.A. and a job as a baker at a dog-treat bakery, and before long had graduated to playing the voice of a dog on a Disney Channel sitcom. Within a year she’d landed guest spots on

and then in 2006—which would have been her senior year of high school—she shot

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Since then, Stone’s career can be divided into roughly three eras. First came her supporting years, playing the funny, cool girl third or fourth on the bill (

. Then her lead years, doing teen comedy

Most recently came her comic-book period, playing Gwen Stacy in

which pokes fun at that same kind of franchise. (Stone shot it during a break in

When she was nominated for an Oscar alongside such luminaries as Meryl Streep and Laura Dern, she claims she didn’t even bother writing a speech. (“Are you out of your mind? Are you actually insane? Patricia Arquette had that thing

) But she did take home a Lego Oscar statuette (provided by the makers of

), which enjoyed a place of honor on her nightstand until recently being retired to a drawer.

Emma Stone Graces the Cover of WSJ. Magazine

On location in Malibu, the Oscar nominee feels right at home in casual yet cozy looks

ON THE COVER | Actress Emma Stone. Trademark silk turtleneck,

Photography by Angelo Pennetta for WSJ. Magazine, Styling by Francesca Burns

out this July, marks the second time Emma Stone has appeared in a film by Woody Allen.

FUNNY GIRL | ‘There’s this insane thing that happens,’ Stone says, ‘where you start not just doing things because you’re lucky to have gotten the job, but you actually start making choices.’ Chloé wool and silk knit poncho,

Photography by Angelo Pennetta, Styling by Francesca Burns

RIGHT TO BARE ARMS | Stone, shot on location in Malibu, California, in a Calvin Klein Collection leather dress,

$3,995, Calvin Klein Collection Madison Avenue, New York.

’There’s something about the immediacy of acting. You can’t afford to think about a million other things. Acting forces me to be a zen master,” says Stone. Paul Andrew leather boots,

’She’s so good in everything,’ says Woody Allen. ‘I see a lot of the best traits of Diane Keaton in her—Keaton was someone who could be in

and movies with Meryl Streep but also do comedy and sing and dance. I think Emma has the potential to be one of the biggest female stars for years.’

who, if all the rumors are to be believed, recently became her ex-boyfriend. Their relationship status is a subject of such fervent speculation that just yesterday, when Stone was caught by paparazzi leaving their shared stylist’s office with a paper bag labeled

the resulting photographs launched a thousand blog posts. Was she returning her ex’s things post-breakup? Doing a favor for the guy who’s still her boyfriend? Or just messing with everybody?

“See, I never talk about this stuff for this exact reason—because it’s all so speculative and baseless,” Stone says. “Once you start responding—once you’re like, ‘No, that’s not true’—then they’re like, ‘Well, if we push enough, we’ll get a comment, so let’s see what else we can make up.’ I understand the interest in it completely,” she adds, “because I’ve had it, too. But it’s so special to me that it never feels good to talk about, so I just continually don’t talk about it.”

That said, she admits: She could have easily flipped the bag around to hide his name. “Yeah,” Stone says, with the hint of a smile. “When I picked up the bag, I was like, ‘This is kind of funny if there are any [paparazzi] out there.’ There’s probably some rebelliousness that comes out in me after all these stories and people texting you for weeks about something that, for the most part, is not true. But even when it’s false, I would rather just let it be false.”

‘There’s something about the immediacy of acting. You can’t afford to think about a million other things. Acting forces me to be a zen master.’

Stone’s fierce protection of her privacy suffered another blow recently with the infamous

. She’s made nine movies with the studio, so naturally her name came up in several leaked emails. Still, she was mainly concerned for colleagues at the studio who had their Social Security numbers stolen—until a couple of weeks ago, when her email address and cellphone number were published on WikiLeaks. “Then I did one of the worst things ever, which was react really quickly,” she says. “I was getting all these emails and texts from people I didn’t know—‘Hi, I’m Joe from the U.K. I like your movies’—and I was so overwhelmed that I went to my in-box and I deleted all my emails. In about a 30-second span, I hit ‘Select All’ and ‘Delete Forever,’ and thousands of emails, like six years of emails, are now gone forever. I was just so freaked out that someone was

The fact that her account itself hadn’t been hacked—that technically, no one was “in there”—was of little comfort. “It was horrible. I cried for like an hour. Most of the emails I’m mourning I can still talk to the person and get them back. But there’s others where the person is actually gone. It really sucks.” I wonder how many unwanted emails she must have gotten to prompt such a dramatic response. Hundreds? Thousands?

“No, no,” Stone says, suddenly grinning sheepishly. “It was probably five emails and five texts. I just went

BY NOW THE PLATES have been cleared; the golden light leaking through the blinds has turned dark. Stone orders a black coffee and pops a single sugar cube into her mouth. “Do only children eat sugar cubes? Now I’m feeling weird about it. You eat one.” She blinks twice, hard. “My eye twitch that I get when I have too much caffeine is back.”

RIGHT TO BARE ARMS | Stone, shot on location in Malibu, California, in a Calvin Klein Collection leather dress, $3,995, Calvin Klein Collection Madison Avenue, New York.

Though she’s a funny, gifted, award-winning actress whose face, Woody Allen told me, “is worth the price of admission,” Stone is not without her eccentricities. She buys ingredients to make her own skin-care products. (“There was a point during

that I was on steroids for like a week because my voice kept going out, and you can’t sleep on steroids, so one night I was up at 3 a.m., and I must have read some article about how to make your own body lotion, because three days later all these boxes from Amazon showed up. I had ordered

) She lurks on strangers’ blogs, usually mom blogs or ones about baking. (“Sometimes if they seem really cool I’ll follow them in secret for like a year, and then email them.” One time, she arranged to meet a baking blogger named Joy in real life; Stone went to her house, and they baked apple-cider doughnuts together.) She has no shortage of pet peeves: animals dressed in outfits, people who send eight texts instead of one (“Just take a second!”), classic names intentionally misspelled. “Like Emily being E-M-A-L-I-E,” she says, disgusted. “Drives me crazy.”

All of which makes her sort of a perfect fit for a Woody Allen movie. Stone has been a fan of Allen’s since she saw

when she was 14. She used to go to the Café Carlyle in Manhattan to watch him play clarinet; she even had a dog named Alvy, after Allen’s character in Annie Hall, Alvy Singer. She first met the director when he requested a meeting about his last movie, 2014’s

Allen says he’d seen her in “one of those young people’s movies” while exercising on his treadmill and thought, “My God, this girl is remarkable.” The meeting lasted four minutes. “I don’t even think I took off my coat,” Stone says. When she showed up on set, she says, she was “absolutely convinced I was going to be fired.”

“It’s terrifying,” she adds. “He doesn’t do table reads or any rehearsal. You can’t even ask questions about your character, because he’ll be like: ‘You know this is a movie, right?’ ” Says Allen: “I never talk to any of the actors in any of my movies about anything if I can avoid it.”

their second film together, is a story about, as Stone’s co-star

says in a voice-over at the beginning of the film, “morality, choice, the aesthetics of life, randomness and murder.” Stone plays Jill, an enthusiastic college student who embarks on an ill-fated and possibly dangerous affair with Phoenix’s character, an alcoholic philosophy professor. When Allen first began writing the film, he wasn’t thinking of Stone. “But once I was 10 pages in, I thought, Oh God, who else would play this so perfectly? A beautiful young college student, an intellectual philosophy major? Emma could phone this in and be great.”

At this point for Stone, it’s a matter of choosing what she really wants to do. “There’s this insane thing that happens where you get to a point where you start not just doing things because you’re lucky to have gotten the job, but you actually start making choices,” she says. She still naturally gravitates toward comedy, which she finds the most freeing and rewarding. “But recently I’m starting to enjoy having experiences that I wouldn’t allow myself to have in real life—like Sally onstage, and the kind of mental breakdown she goes through. To do that in front of an audience was super liberating. I’m interested in things that are really scary and ambitious lately. Obviously

was like that. And then doing the play, I was like, ‘This feels like it could totally go wrong every single day.’ And something about that feels vital. Is that a stupid thing to say?”

Despite heavy interest from the studio, she recently passed on the upcoming all-female

reboot. “The script was really funny,” she says. “It just didn’t feel like the right time for me. A franchise is a big commitment—it’s a whole

I think maybe I need a minute before I dive back into that water.” She’d be excited to play someone crazy or dangerous, something she could really let loose with—maybe even a villain. “That would be amazing,” she says. “I would love that.”

“She can handle anything you throw at her,” says Will Gluck, who directed her in

“She’s so good in everything,” agrees Allen. “I see a lot of the best traits of Diane Keaton in her—Keaton was someone who could be in

and movies with Meryl Streep but also do comedy and sing and dance. I think Emma has the potential to be one of the biggest female stars for years.”

Next week Stone goes to Cannes for the premiere of Irrational Man

then to London for a few days with her mom. Then it’s back to L.A. to start work on

a contemporary musical about an aspiring actress and a jazz pianist, directed by Damien Chazelle

. Stone will sing and dance in it; she’s already rehearsing the dance numbers. But she’s also trying to follow the advice of her good friend

who counseled her to keep some things—like singing—for herself.

“He told me to keep some things I love just for me,” Stone says. “The idea is to have some things that you don’t feel like you need to share with the world. To have some things that are only yours.” She smiles. “Of course, now I’m doing a musical. I’m working on it.”

The big spread on the "Life" page of the WSJ sure does help keep her personal life private. 

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