Emma Stone is currently busy promoting her upcoming movie Bugonia, for which she even went as extreme as chopping all her hair down for the role. However, as much as she wanted to keep her bald head a secret to maintain an element of surprise, one mistake from the Oscar-winner just didn’t help: The fact that she is just “really bad at keeping any secret.”
During her recent appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, she explained how exactly this particular adventure of hers went down, sharing that she wore wigs at events to hide her baldness but still fell short since she kept on talking about her wig to pretty much everyone. The Amazing Spider-Man actress said,
It was a great wig. The problem is, I am so unsubtle and generally stupid, that the wig looked good, but the whole night I was like [whispers], ‘Hehe, can you tell it’s a wig?’ to everyone. And they’re like, ‘We’re pretty sure she’s wearing a wig since she moved it around a lot and kept saying [she was wearing a wig].’ There was, like, a lip-reading video where I was like [mouths], ‘The wig! So, I’m bald, and this is a wig!’ It was so- I was, like, really bad at keeping any secrets.
Hilariously enough, it didn’t take long for those paying attention to realize that Stone was actually wearing a wig (see @em1lystone’s tweet on X). That said, her genius idea to keep her bald transformation a secret didn’t really work out.
The Reason Why Emma Stone Wanted to Keep Her Bald Transformation a Secret
Emma Stone is known for doing whatever is necessary to embody and portray her characters as accurately as possible. So when it came to shaving her head for her absurdist black comedy Bugonia, she didn’t hesitate to go all in. But, of course, the real troubles came when she had to keep the transformation a secret and sport a wig around.
Why did she want to keep her bald head a secret, in the first place, you may ask? Well, as she recently confessed, the Poor Things star simply disguised her look to maintain an element of “surprise or an interesting moment” – even though she didn’t really love wearing beanies for three months to keep the dramatic transformation a secret.
In a recent exclusive interview with PEOPLE, Stone got candid about the same, revealing,
Because one of the great things that happened with Poor Things was nobody had seen pictures of [her character] Bella’s look, that really long black hair. It was fun when the trailer came out for that, and it was like, ‘Whoa.’ It’s nice when it’s revealed later.
Plus, she added that, since there were “no pictures or candids from set” while the movie was still in its filming stages, she thought, “Why not keep this up for a little bit?” The best part? After the production of the movie wrapped, the actress found herself in love with her new look, as she even debuted her gorgeous grown-out pixie cut this past March at the Golden Globes 2025.
What is Emma Stone’s Bugonia All About?
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, Bugonia is a sci-fi absurdist black comedy and an English-language remake of the South Korean flick Save the Green Planet! from 2003 by Jang Joon-hwan. A co-production of Ireland, South Korea, and the U.S., it stars Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, and Alicia Silverstone, among others.
The storyline follows two conspiracy-obsessed young men, Teddy (played by Plemons) and Don (played by Delbis), who kidnap a powerful CEO of a major company, Michelle Fuller (played by Stone), when they become convinced that she is secretly an alien who wants to destroy Earth. (See our review here.)
Early reviews of the film have already earned it a sweet 90% critical approval score on the Tomatometer alongside an equally nice 83% general audience approval score on the Popcornmeter on Rotten Tomatoes. The project has also successfully bagged 7.6 stars out of 10 rating on IMDb, as well as 4 out of 5 on Letterboxd, as of this writing.
The film had its world premiere in the main competition of the 82nd Venice International Film Festival on August 28 this year. It was slated to get a limited theatrical release in the United States by Focus Features on October 24, before having a wide release on October 31, 2025.
Make sure to catch Bugonia in theatres on October 31st!
