Is Emma Stone the smartest actress in Hollywood? Emma Stone is the smartest actress in Hollywood. Her Oscar nomination for Poor Creatures, her penultimate collaboration with Yorgos Lanthimos, is practically guaranteed. And, if time is not too cruel to her, the 2025 Emmys will remember her performance in The Curse. The series by Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie arrived at the last minute at the last Golden Globes and still managed to win a nomination. For Stone, of course. That’s what it takes to be a star of that caliber.
Precisely for this reason the actress would not have to participate in a fiction as Martian as The Curse. With this unclassifiable series, Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie revalidate their title as the biggest geeks in the industry. Safdie wrote the very strange (indeed: miraculous) Adam Sandler’s Diamonds in the Rough and Fielder is responsible for some of the biggest craziness that TV has allowed in recent years. Yours is the wonderful The Essays. Her writing is also in some scripts of Who is America? by Sacha Baron Cohen. Nathan Fielder’s indescribable, and yet very recognizable, sense of humor connects with Larry David, with The Comeback and with everything that has to do with recognizing that we live in a post-everything, meta-everything world obsessed with interpretations. and drills. Fielder is also the protagonist of The Curse. In the series he plays Asher Siegel, a disturbing loser married to Whitney (Emma Stone). The Siegels are dedicated to improving the world by building eco-responsible houses for the poor, putting a specialty coffee shop next to them (the kind where you don’t mind adding sugar to your coffee) and filming the process to produce a docu-reality about the good things. people they are and how much good they are doing.
With that premise, the uncomfortable comedy comes out on its own. However, Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie are not satisfied with having everything (including a superstar like Stone descending into the haunted mud) to give us bittersweet laughs and take The Curse much further. The discomfort is in the tone of the series, but also in its characters, their gender and their appearance. Fielder and Safdie never allow the viewer to relax and constantly violate them. His series is, indeed, post-comic and meta-horror. With its very long sequences and elusive characters, The Curse, available on SkyShowtime, never lets itself get caught up. It’s as if the viewer has to chase her all the time so as not to be left behind. This endeavor is, surprisingly, addictive. I’m still not sure what this series wants to tell me, but I need to know. Emma Stone had to say something like this when she found out about the existence of this project: “I’m still not sure what these guys want to tell me, but I need to work with them.” She, the image of Louis Vuitton, one of the most conservative multinationals in the luxury industry, is at the same time an almost punk artist. Emma takes a risk and wins. And we all win.
