For much of her early career, Emma Stone was Hollywood’s favorite girl next door. From Easy A and Crazy, Stupid, Love to The Amazing Spider-Man, Stone proved to be an actress who could portray smart, funny, and charismatic women who held audiences captive without breaking a sweat. She showed she could do serious dramatic material with Birdman and Battle of the Sexes, and her performance in La La Land won her an Academy Award. But in 2018, Stone took a sharp turn into much weirder territory, starring in a Netflix sci-fi series that set the stage for the bizarre characters that have come to define her career.
Stone reunited with her Superbad co-star Jonah Hill in the ten-episode Netflix limited series Maniac, which premiered on September 21, 2018. Stone plays Annie Landsberg, a troubled young woman in an experimental drug trial with Owen Milgrim (Hill). The treatment is supposed to help emotionally disturbed people, but instead it makes their hallucinations more and more bizarre, living out alternate lives. In the psy-fi dramedy, Stone had a chance to try something different from the leading lady roles that made her famous.
Emma Stone was ready to do something weird. Talking about the process of creating the characters, Cary Joji Fukunaga, who directed the entire series, said Stone had no interest in playing a therapist for a troubled man or another manic pixie dream girl. The director wanted his actors to go against type, which freed Stone and Hill from their usual archetypes. And in that department, Maniac delivers. Along the way in the series, Stone plays a suburban Long Island housewife in a bizarre lemur theft, a con artist in the ’40s who goes to a séance, a medieval adventurer protecting an elf princess, and a CIA agent. Stone’s hallucinations take her through broad comedy, fantasy, action, and psychological horror.
But these adventures are more than a reason to watch Stone play dress-up. Annie is dealing with the death of her sister Ellie (Julia Garner) and has become addicted to a drug that allows her to relive their last moments together. She is so desperate to see her sister that she is prepared to constantly go through the trauma of losing her over and over again. Behind these shifting identities lies a heartbreaking performance about grief, guilt, and the inability to move on.
Maniac’s alternate 2018 setting is like a blend of a 1980s pharmaceutical ad and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Big computers run quaint old technology that has commodified nearly every aspect of human life. For those who can’t afford the goods and services they want, Ad Buddy will assign a representative, and they’ll be bombarded with ads. Friend Proxy is for those who are incapable of maintaining real human relationships but can fall back on artificial companionship. Creator Patrick Somerville said the ideas were inspired by the themes of isolation and the commodification of intimacy people were beginning to face in 2018 and have since become an epidemic. Like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Maniac has a complex science fiction premise to ponder if technology can help with emotional pain. Its surreal humor is reminiscent of shows like Severance, which blend the absurdity of corporate life with the psychological turmoil of its characters. The cast goes into detail about embracing the show’s absurd situations and bold premise:
The series marked a turning point in Stone’s career toward the strange and unusual. Months after the series premiered, she would play the scheming Abigail Masham in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favorite. Over the years, the likable actress found greater success playing strong, independent women who were abrasive, manipulative, and profoundly unconventional. With her superb performance as Bella Baxter in Poor Things, for which Stone received a second Oscar, she elevated that freedom to a new level. Next came the awkward psychological comedy The Curse and the zany characters in Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness. Stone shaved her head to play a pharmaceutical CEO kidnapped by conspiracy theorists who mistook her for an alien in 2025’s Bugonia, taking their collaboration to new absurd levels. In addition to starring in these films, she earned her stripes as a respected producer. She was letting the world see the kinds of stories she wanted to tell.
Eight years after its release, Maniac remains one of Netflix’s most underappreciated shows. Its strange humor, elaborate production design, and surprisingly moving exploration of grief are worth another look. So is Stone’s performance, which showed that one of Hollywood’s most charming leading ladies became even more interesting when she let herself be weird.
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