Emma Stone has said she’s finally ready to be called by her real name after a Hollywood rule forced her to drop it.
The two-time Oscar winner, 35, revealed that she prefers her birth name and has struggled to live with being known as Emma for years.
In a chat alongside her The Curse costar Nathan Fielder, the actress admitted, “For some reason, I was like, ‘I can’t do it anymore. Just call me Emily.'”
When asked by The Hollywood Reporter for a Wednesday, April 24, interview whether she’d correct a fan if they called her by her real name instead of Emma, she responded, “No. That would be so nice. I would like to be Emily.”
She explained that “people that I work with” call her Emily once she gets to know them better. She explained that she was asked to make her stage name “Emma Stone” because Emily Stone “was taken” by another actress who was a member of SAG-AFTRA before her.
However, in 2018, Stone revealed that when she was younger, she actually wanted to be called Emma because of her favorite Spice Girl: Baby Spice, a.k.a. Emma Bunton.
“Growing up, I was super blonde, and my real name is Emily, but I wanted to be called Emma because of Baby Spice and guess what? Now I am,” the Poor Things star said during an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “It wasn’t necessarily because of her but yes, in second grade, did I go up to the teacher on the first day and ask her to call me Emma? Yes, I did, and was it because of Emma Lee Bunton from the Spice Girls? Yes it was.”
Elsewhere in the chat, Stone said she was not annoyed in the slightest by Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel’s show joke about her movie Poor Things.
“Did he upset me?” she asked about her reaction to the ceremony gag. “No! I didn’t call him a prick … What did I say? I didn’t call him a prick. I wasn’t upset with him at all. I’ll have to look that up.”
During the Academy Awards broadcast in March, Kimmel, 56, introduced footage of the Best Picture–nominated Poor Things. After showing a handful of scenes, the Jimmy Kimmel Live! host quipped, “Those were all the parts of Poor Things we’re allowed to show on TV.”
