LUCKILY for
Emma Stone, her first career choice of acting is working out. Her second choice? Journalist.
And we all know what's happening in that field. Still, Stone won't be dissuaded.
"I'd love to be a copy editor," she says seriously. "I love punctuation and grammar and spelling.
"I don't mean to brag, but I'm pretty good at it."
Well, maybe she could check this story before it goes to print?
"I would love to - I'll edit you!" she almost-growls with excitement. "My friend has been writing a lot lately and she sends over her stuff and I go through it with a red pen, like ... 'Yes!' ... 'Paragraph break here!'"
She sighs happily.
"I love it so much."
That's the 23-year-old's logical side shining through - a side she'd like to feed in future by learning more about astronomy, biology, medicine and, yes, baking.
Stone is a smart cookie, but she didn't attend high school - she was home-schooled through those years and shot her breakout movie Superbad in what would have been her final year.
But she doesn't feel she missed out on any of the, er, fun.
"I've been to high school three times: once in Superbad, once in Easy A and once in The Amazing Spider-Man. So my high school experience is: guys wanting to get alcohol and have sex with you; you have to pretend to be a slut and get paid for it; and your boyfriend is a superhero."
She puts on her best you-go-girlfriend voice: "So I can relate, girls! I get it!"
However, as much as Stone craves logical pastimes, creativity is her full-time concern.
She was headstrong about moving to Hollywood from Phoenix to pursue acting as a teenager, and post-Superbad has zoomed ever upward through Zombieland, Easy A, Crazy, Stupid, Love, The Help and now on to The Amazing Spider-Man.
She's Golden Globe nominated, the face of Revlon ...
"It has been such a whirlwind. I feel so lucky and so confused all at the same time. Like, which way is up?"
It worked out, says the husky-voiced faux-redhead (who's currently blonde), because she found "people who 'got' me".
"And a lot of people did not understand what was going on with a 15-year-old who sounded like I do now.
"I do know that there's something inside me that wouldn't let me go home. But why it worked out I have no f---ing clue. Luck."
Luck, sure. But there's something that sets Stone - and the characters she has played - apart from your run-of-the-mill early-20s starlet.
Not for her is screaming at sharks while wearing a bikini and gazing doe-eyed at the leading man.
From the budding journalist in The Help to the law graduate of Crazy, Stupid, Love, the Stone we've fallen for at the cinema is just as sassy and witty as the girl off-screen.
"I'm hugely drawn to smart, independent women on screen," she says. "Most of my comedic heroes are men because that's what I was exposed to when I was younger. But now I'm so grateful for things like Bridesmaids. The truth of women is something I'm seeing more than anything now, not just these one-note, confident women.
"My ultimate goal is to portray lots of different sides of women."
So her ditzy arm-candy moment may yet come?
"That's right!"
The young woman Stone plays in The Amazing Spider-Man is certainly multi-faceted - but doesn't get to play out all those notes in what is the first instalment of a franchise.
Peter Parker's love interest Gwen Stacy is, as Stone puts it, "one of the original damsels in distress". But she's also Parker's intellectual equal, unafraid of bullies and very funny.
Yet it's the tragedy of playing Spidey's first love - and the daughter of the local police chief - that Stone seems to have been drawn to the most.
Spoiler alert: When Gwen was killed off in a 1973 edition of the comic-book, there was a fan outcry, and the death became a marker of an end of an era in comic history.
"I didn't know what happened to Gwen, I was like, 'Holy s---!' I mean, it's incredible, it's so tragic and horrible and awesome. It's so daring of them to do," says Stone.
"That was a big draw, maybe like a morbid curiosity of mine. I've never really played a damsel in distress before, I've never played someone who ultimately is reliant on a man and I found that interesting. I know that's the opposite of what I've usually said, because I love strong, independent female characters; there's not enough of them.
"But there's also something tragic and head-over-heels in love about Gwen; it's like a Romeo and Juliet situation and something I felt a kinship to for whatever reason ... That first love," she takes a deep breath, "oh boy."
Stone and the new Spider-Man, English 28-year-old Andrew Garfield, do make a great Romeo and Juliet. And the "oh boy" leaked off screen - the pair have been photographed snuggling up on the streets of New York.
Stone won't comment on that, but will admit to being "in love with Spider-Man". And her bubbly, fun-poking demeanour served as a good counterpoint to Garfield's very serious approach on set.
"I don't know if that was my role, but that's just how I function," she laughs. "So I'm sure I did that."
In her next film, the noir mobster drama Gangster Squad (which reunites her with Crazy, Stupid, Love co-star Ryan Gosling and Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer), Stone will get to dip her toe into arm-candy territory.
"She's kind of arm-candy and kind of broken, in a lot of ways," Stone says.
But Stone will always return to that inclination for a well-timed one-liner.
"My brain is naturally comedy-inclined so it feels like second nature to make a joke about something," she says.
"It's harder for me to cry, it's harder for me to get to those places I don't want to feel because as a comedian you spend your life trying to make people laugh and trying to lighten the situation. Since I was a kid, that's what I tried to do.
"So breaking out of 'Let's make people feel better!' is hard for me."
A box office tally nearing $1 billion would suggest the movie-going public doesn't want Stone to break out of that habit any time soon.
SEE The Amazing Spider-Man is now showing
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EMMA STONE'S COMEDY HEROES
> > GILDA RADNER
"Gilda Radner was the woman that I looked to," says Stone.
Radner was the first comedian cast on sketch TV institution Saturday Night Live when it began in 1975. Radner married movie funnyman Gene Wilder in 1984, but died in 1989 of ovarian cancer. Mike Myers has also stated Radner was his inspiration for wanting to join SNL.
> > MOLLY SHANNON
Another SNL graduate. Shannon's most famous character was Mary Katherine Gallagher, a kooky Catholic school girl whose dreams of musical stardom make the Glee kids look unambitious. Funnily enough, Shannon went on to appear in Glee, as well as the US version of Kath & Kim.
> > KRISTEN WIIG
Wiig retired from SNL after the film she co-wrote and starred in, Bridesmaids, became a fairly big deal. "The great thing about Bridesmaids is it depicts women who aren't exactly strong, they are just real," says Stone. "Kristen Wiig's character is a train wreck and she's amazing. It's just such a beautiful, fully formed character."
> > BILL MURRAY
Stone admits to being a "complete idiot" when she shared scenes with the SNL and Ghostbusters star in the 2009 apocalypse comedy Zombieland. Woody Harrelson told Vanity Fair the famously curmudgeonly Murray returned the love: "Bill Murray told me, 'That girl is gold'. He don't say that about everyone."
