In a cover story profile of Emma Stone in the Wall Street Journal Magazine — in which she glows about the people she’s worked with, and they glow even more about her — there was one marked, glowing absence: a ghost, if you will. Stone was asked, as the magazine sorted through her past and future careers, why she declined to be in the upcoming female Ghostbusters reboot. The film, directed by Paul Feig, now has an all-comedian list of stars in Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones, Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy, and is sure to be a massive hit. But despite courtship from the studio, Stone decided the timing was off:
The script was really funny. It just didn’t feel like the right time for me. A franchise is a big commitment—it’s a whole thing. I think maybe I need a minute before I dive back into that water.
Indeed, she already seems to have plenty on her plate: Ghostbusters is slated for release in July of next Summer — a week after her upcoming musical by Whiplash director Damien Chazelle hits theaters. Instead of showing her aptitude at supernatural policing, she’ll get to strut her song-and-dance skills (which some lucky audiences already experienced in her starring role alongside Alan Cumming in Cabaret) opposite Ryan Gosling. The film, as Deadline described when it was first announced, is an “old fashioned musical set in contemporary Los Angeles [that] centers on a love story between a jazz pianist and an aspiring actress.”
Her next collaboration with Woody Allen — Irrational Man — is coming out this summer, and Allen is among Stone’s greatest champions in the profile, despite his claim that he “never talk[s] to any of the actors in any of [his] movies about anything if [he] can avoid it.” Speaking to WSJ Magazine, he compared Stone to Diane Keaton:
Keaton was someone who could be in The Godfather and movies with Meryl Streep but also do comedy and sing and dance.
