Do we like Emma Stone?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A clean record on harm and a decent one on people, with one contested stand on Israel and Gaza that splits her fans.
Emma Stone grew up in Scottsdale, Arizona, and started acting at 11 in middle-school theatre. At 15 she talked her parents into a move to Los Angeles with a PowerPoint presentation. Her break came from winning a VH1 reality show in 2004, and Superbad followed in 2007.
From there it was Easy A, the Spider-Man films, a Broadway turn in Cabaret, then a best actress Oscar for La La Land. She won a second for Poor Things, which makes her a two-time winner. She now produces as well, and she was a producer on Bugonia.
The stoush that hangs around her is Aloha. She played a character of part-Chinese and Hawaiian heritage, and the casting was widely called whitewashing. At the 2019 Golden Globes Sandra Oh joked about it and Stone shouted “I'm sorry!” from the audience. That reads as someone who took the criticism on board rather than ducking it.
On the harm check, nothing of her own turned up against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet. I found no conspiracy slide and no pattern of working with people who push harm. That's thin evidence either way on the climate side, so say so: I didn't find a clear statement from her on it.
Her contested stand is Israel and Gaza. In September 2025 she signed the Film Workers for Palestine pledge, which calls for a boycott of film institutions it says are implicated in genocide and apartheid. It names institutions, not individuals. Paramount rejected the boycott as silencing artists, and where you land depends on whether you read it as a stand for Palestinians or as a blanket penalty on Israeli filmmakers.
The other bit of recent heat was a Bugonia Q&A in late 2025, where she mentioned the killing of a healthcare CEO in New York and the Luigi Mangione case. Some online critics called it out of touch. It was a clumsy joke rather than anything nasty. Nothing new has surfaced on her lately beyond a Miss Piggy project she's producing with Jennifer Lawrence.