Emma Stone’s role in ‘Bugonia’ was initially meant for a woman in her 50s

• Emma Stone stars in “Bugonia,” a remake of a South Korean dark comedy.
• Stone plays a powerful young CEO who is kidnapped.
• Screenwriter Will Tracy told BI he originally wrote the character as a CEO in her 50s.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest movie would have looked a lot different if he hadn’t chosen to collaborate with Emma Stone.

In “Bugonia,” Stone plays fictional pharmaceutical company CEO Michelle Fuller, who is kidnapped by two conspiracy-obsessed beekeepers (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis) who are convinced she’s an alien.

The colorful concept comes from the film’s source material — it’s loosely a remake of “Save the Green Planet!,” a 2003 South Korean dark comedy directed by Jang Joon-hwan — but in the development process, screenwriter Will Tracy (“Succession,” “The Menu”) ended up making a few big changes.

Producer Ari Aster (“Midsommar,” “Hereditary”) had suggested flipping the CEO’s gender from man to woman, and Tracy liked the idea. Then they made yet another change.

“When I first wrote the script, the character was supposed to be more in their 50s or older,” Tracy told Business Insider. “And then obviously that changed when Emma came on.”

Director Lanthimos signed on to the movie in the late summer of 2023, just before his movie “Poor Things” world premiered at the Venice Film Festival and went on to win four Oscars, including best actress for Stone. He brought on Stone, they tweaked the character, and the rest is history.

Lanthimos told Business Insider that he read the “Bugonia” script in one sitting and was hooked.

“I felt it was very funny and exciting and suspenseful and interesting and complex,” Lanthimos said. “I immediately sent the script to Emma, and we both decided that this is something that we want to get involved in.”

Tracy said he was drawn to pitting Stone’s Fuller, a savvy businesswoman accustomed to dealing with high-stress situations and navigating her way out of them, against Plemons’ Teddy, a passionate conspiracy theorist who will never budge on his beliefs.

“They are both being drawn out a bit in those conversations,” Tracy said. “She is someone who has a lot of power and masks her ruthlessness and agenda with a kind of smooth, frictionless, ostensibly liberal corporate optics, and he has convinced himself of a certain reality that informs his worldview.”

Looking back on it now, Tracy thinks having a younger CEO was the perfect choice for the story.

“It was quite interesting having a younger woman CEO who was that powerful and not Boomer age,” Tracy said. “A lot of the younger tech and biomedical CEOs these days do tend to be a little bit younger, so it actually made more sense for that world.”

“Bugonia” is now playing in select theaters and will begin its wide release on October 31.

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