Poor Things: 'In America, there’s a lot of shame around sexuality and nudity'
Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo in Poor Things.
At first glance, Bella Baxter looks like an ordinary, if captivatingly beautiful, young woman. Her long, dark hair and stark eyebrows contrast with her pale skin and wide eyes and she seems to look upon the world with a child-like wonder and curious rebelliousness.
That is, in fact, because Bella Baxter might have the body of a woman but her brain is that of a child. She is an experiment of Godwin Baxter, a zany scientist with wondrous ideas who brought her back from the dead. Now she has the truly unique experience of moving through the world as an adult but with the innocent, inquisitive mind of a child — a state ripe for manipulation were she not such a headstrong character.
Emma Stone has already bagged a Golden Globe for her performance as Bella in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Frankenstein-esque Poor Things, a study of what it means to be a woman in the world with no personal history, trauma, shame or memories, just a body and the desire to experience.
And oh, boy, does she experience. As Bella’s mind matures under the watchful eye of her creator Godwin — or ‘God’ — played by Willem Dafoe, and his student Max McCandless, played by Ramy Youssef, she soon discovers delight in carnal pleasures, free from societal ideas of shame around sexuality.
“One of the coolest parts about getting to do this was the shedding of all of that [shame], or asking why you feel a certain way about these societal constructs that are on you,” says Easy A and The Favourite star Stone, 35.
“At least in America, there’s a lot of shame around sexuality and nudity and your body, but not really around violence… you can show all of that but God forbid it’s a woman enjoying herself, which is kind of fascinating when you think about it more deeply.
“But… sex is just one part of her experience. Everything is happening for the first time so she’s learning so much about what she likes and doesn’t like, and power and possession. And how her just being this really honest, open person is making many people react to her in all these different ways based on their own ego and their own stuff that they came into this with. I just see it as one facet of a very big exploration of what it means to be alive.”
Poor Things has a strong Irish input, with Dublin-based producers Element Pictures again collaborating with director Lanthimos, and Tallaght man Robbie Ryan on cinematography duties. Several of those involved attended the film's Irish premiere at Cork Opera House as part of Cork International Film Festival in November.
Throughout the film, we see Bella learn and grow, both in her ideas and understanding of the world and in her physicality, as she learns co-ordination and language in her adult body.
“It was one of the most fun parts about playing Bella, that physicality,” Stone says. “We did rehearsal with all the actors, and we started that dance sequence with Mark (Ruffalo), and then Yorgos and I would have separate rehearsals that were to stage out Bella’s development — her walk and her clap…
“Other than that, it was just coming up with things on the day, trying different things take to take… trusting that Yorgos and Blackfish, our editor, would piece it together in a way that felt interesting and cohesive but still kind of irreverent and strange, which I think is never not going to happen in a Yorgos movie.”
As Bella is a beautiful yet inherently innocent woman, men with a variety of motives are drawn to her like moths to a flame. One is Youssef’s Max, called in by God to help him study his experiment before being asked to make Bella his wife.
“He has that desire to control like any of the men in the film do,” notes Youssef, 32. “I think he is the one who learns to let go and he’s expanded by the love that he has for her… I really feel like all the men in the film exist in every man. We all have these parts of us, whether it’s the manipulator, or the part that’s trying to control, or the horny buffoon that exists within all of us, and then you kind of have to look at all of that and say, ‘OK, but who do I really want to be?’ I think that’s where Max comes in.”
The “horny buffoon” Youssef references is Duncan Wedderburn, a debauched lawyer played by the Hulk actor Mark Ruffalo. Bella, hungry for worldly experiences, runs off on a hedonistic adventure with Duncan, who becomes her lover. His alpha male mentality makes for a brilliantly comedic character but his controlling nature forces Bella to confront some hard truths about the world outside God’s careful protection.
“I tried to talk him out of casting me,” reveals Ruffalo, 56, of his initial response to Lanthimos. “He just laughed at me and he was like, ‘You’re him’. And that was it.”
Expanding on his reservations about the role, Ruffalo says: “I haven’t done anything like this, and then you start to believe maybe what limitations you have. The world right now, it’s just so on you all the time… there’s so much judgement and it’s just kind of a weirdly oppressive time and you carry that, you take that on, subconsciously.
“So I’m like… ‘Does anyone want to see me do this?’
“And thank God… my wife was kicking me, my team was like, ‘Get your ass in there, of course you’re gonna do this!’ And yeah, I did it.” Adapting Poor Things from Alasdair Gray’s novel for the screen is no mean feat, though Lanthimos’s absurdism and unique comedic charm has made him the perfect candidate for taking on the story.
“He gives a great setup and the world is very complete and he kind of puts you in it and then watches you,” says Dafoe, 68, of the director. “Even in the corrections, he does it in very subtle ways. It’s not always direct, he does it by adjusting things around you, sometimes, even.”
“It’s been a real gift to get to work with him, and to also get the opportunity to do the kind of material that he’s drawn to, because I think he always wants stories that ask more questions than give answers,” says Stone, who has collaborated with Lanthimos on several projects including 2018’s The Favourite.
“They make you think and different people react to them in different ways, similarly to how different characters react to Bella in different ways. I find what he loves to do so fascinating and I trust him so deeply as a filmmaker and we’re friends. So it’s a lovely combination of things to experience.”
- Poor Things is in cinemas from Friday January 12
