Poor Things came up with some big wins at the 2024 Oscars, as the film, a twisted take on the Frankenstein story, received a number of nominations. Emma Stone ended up taking home the Best Actress award yet again, but it seems Stone's nudity has been the primary topic of conversation surrounding the film despite this. 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.
Stone said that her decision to make Poor Things wasn’t drastically impacted by the amount of nudity in the script in an interview with People. She didn’t really have a problem with filming any of that, however. When asked what was actually tough for her, she said the scene where she ate 60 Portuguese tarts was much harder, 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 about 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, and, as such, is busy discovering the world around her. Delicious food is just one of the pleasures she experiences (one of the others leading to all the nudity). 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.
It's a facet of the character to overdo the food, though Bella seems to have more fun than the actor with it. 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.
Sure, perhaps Emma Stone is exaggerating, but it’s just as likely she counted them and she actually ate that many while shooting Poor Things. Portuguese pastry can be really good; I’ve had some stuff that's so amazing I still dream about it, but I get that would probably change if I ate 60 of them.
Poor Things is one of Emma Stone's best movies, though some movie fans had thoughts about her beating out Lily Gladstone for the Academy Award. Here's hoping the next time she's in an awards contender, she can get through it without any major food snafus.
Meanwhile, you can stream the flick and other explicit movies on Hulu.
