Poor Things has a shot at a very big Oscar night in a cou[ple weeks, as the film, a twisted take on the Frankenstein story, received a number of 2024 Academy Award nominations. Emma Stone could end up taking home the Best Actress award yet again, but it seems Stone’s nudity is the primary topic of conversation surrounding the film is how much time she spends naked. While I can pretty easily guess why that is, Stone says that eating 60 tarts for the movie was much more difficult for her, and I feel like we should be talking about this more.
Speaking recently with People, Emma Stone said that her decision to make Poor Things wasn’t drastically impacted by the amount of nudity in the script. She didn’t really have a problem with any of that. When asked what was difficult for her, she said the scene where she ate 60 Portuguese tarts was much more difficult, because by the end she was feeling quite sick. She explained…
Figuring out how to walk or eat 60 Portuguese tarts, which the first bite is delicious, but by the end you really want to puke. Or her seeing death and decay for the first time, much more challenging than the nudity, which is the only thing people want to seem to ask me about.
Poor Things is all bout Emma Stone’s character, who has the body of an adult but who, at the beginning of the film, has the mind of a child, as she discovers the world around her. Discovering delicious food is just one of the pleasures she experiences, one of the others leading to all the nudity. And in one scene she discovers the bakery with the tarts, which she devours. Of course, needing to do multiple takes required her to eat a lot. And the character does overdo the food, though the character it seems to have more fun than the actor. One assumes it was much easier to make the food look tasty at the beginning than it was at the end.
This certainly isn’t the first time we’ve heard about actors having to eat a lot of food for a movie, because multiple takes require them to do the same thing over and over again. Still, 60 tarts seems like a lot. Perhaps Emma Stone is exaggerating, but it’s just as likely she counted them and she ate that many. Portuguese pastry can be really good, I’ve had some stuff so amazing I still dream about it. That would probably change if I ate 60 of them.
Poor Things is one of Emma Stone’s best movies, whether or not she takes an Oscar home for it. And if she doesn’t win any more major awards, at least she got to eat well.