Emma Stone Declares Belief in Aliens While Unveiling Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dark Comedy Bugonia at Venice

28 August 2025

Emma Stone arriving at the Venice film festival, where her film Bugonia will premiere. Photograph: Tiziana Fabi/AFP/Getty Images

In a moment that blended whimsy with thoughtful provocation, Emma Stone took the stage at the Venice Film Festival to unveil not just her latest work, but her cosmic convictions. During the press barrage surrounding Bugonia, the black comedy by Yorgos Lanthimos, the Oscar‑winning actor declared that she truly believes in extraterrestrial life, echoing the sentiment of famed astronomer Carl Sagan, who found it profoundly narcissistic to imagine humanity alone in the boundless cosmos.

Promoting Bugonia—a darkly absurd film in which Stone plays Michelle, a powerful corporate CEO kidnapped by conspiracy theorists convinced she is an alien—Stone didn’t just sell the story. She sold the idea of something greater than ourselves. At one point, she turned to reporters and joked with a pointed sincerity: “How do you know I’m not [an alien]?”, before reflecting on our era of fractured identity and digital avatars. “There’s me, and then there’s ‘me’,” she said, explaining how public personas can feel detached from one’s authentic self.

This public confession couldn’t have matched better with the themes of the film. Bugonia—an English‑language remake of the 2003 South Korean cult classic Save the Green Planet!—is Lanthimos’s latest collaboration with Stone. Their partnership, stretching from The Favourite to Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness, has become a known bold cinematic duet.

In Bugonia, Jesse Plemons plays Teddy, a conspiracist beekeeper plagued by ecological collapse and fixated on the idea that Stone’s CEO is an extraterrestrial threat. Aidan Delbis plays his equally conspiratorial accomplice. Their trippy interrogation of Stone’s character unspools into a dark comedic thrill ride, with grotesque humor layered over pointed commentary on capitalism, media mistrust, and the toxic spiral of internet‑fueled radicalization.

The film feels especially timely. Lanthimos has described Bugonia as a mirror to our world: a society grappling with AI, war, climate collapse, and emotional desensitization. The question he poses through this bizarre fantasy remains urgent—is humanity nearing some reckoning?

Reviews of Bugonia have been mixed. Many critics have lauded Stone’s chilling, razor‑sharp performance and Plemons’s quietly unhinged intensity, applauding the film’s bold staging and surreal tonal leaps. But others find that it lacks the emotional resonance and imaginative daring of Lanthimos’s previous hits, calling it technically brilliant yet emotionally distant.

Still, for Stone the film is more than just a performance—it’s an exercise in identity unmasked. Speaking of navigating her public image, she pondered the challenge of distinguishing between her real sense of self and the avatar shaped by social media and public expectation.

And there’s the shaved head. Stone showed off an astonishing bald look in the trailer and during press appearances—an extreme transformation for a character (Michelle) who finds herself literally trapped, yet outrageously in control of her reality. Stone later told Vogue that shaving her head for the role was “wonderful,” evoking the simple pleasure of shedding an imposed identity.

Bugonia screens in Venice’s main competition on August 28 and will arrive in the United States starting with limited theatrical release on October 24, before expanding wide on October 31.

Moments like these, where Stone aligns sci-fi play with philosophical inquiry, underscore the strength of her and Lanthimos’s creative bond. She steps away from Hollywood glamour toward something disorienting, raw, and deeply reflective. In embracing the possibility of alien life, she also embraces a question that feels grounded and familiar—who are we, when no one is watching?