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Emma Stone agreed to shave her head for Bugonia only if director Yorgos Lanthimos did too.
“When I knew we were gonna do this … I said to Yorgos, ‘We’re gonna have to shave your head too so that we’re in solidarity.’ And he’s like, ‘Okay,’ ” the Oscar-winning actress says in a behind-the-scenes video shared exclusively with PEOPLE.
The clip shows footage of Stone, 37, personally taking a buzzer to her frequent collaborator Lanthimos’ head.
“It was exciting,” she says, “but it wasn’t as exciting as I thought it would be to shave his head. It was cool. But it felt more dramatic, my shave. I don’t mean to brag, but my hair was pretty long, and his was not.”
Universal Pictures
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Hair and makeup designer Torsten Witte says the team had to continue re-shaving Stone’s head every three days or so during filming to keep it at the right length for continuity.
“She loves it, and she looks so wonderful without hair,” Witte says.
Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features
In Bugonia, Stone plays a CEO named Michelle Fuller who is kidnapped by two conspiracy theorists (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis) who are convinced she is an alien destroying Earth. Before she’s locked up in their basement, the men shave off the CEO’s hair since they think it’s her way to contact a mothership.
Stone previously worked with Lanthimos, 52, on the movies The Favourite, Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness.
At a Q&A in September, Lanthimos said Stone briefly got “cold feet” about the major hair change. The actress then confirmed it was “right before” they filmed the scene in one take.
“It was a year and a half I knew that I was going to be shaving my head, and then the day of — they were setting up four cameras, because we had to get it in one shot and we were shooting on VistaVision for the most part, which is a gorgeous but very moody camera that will shut down a lot — so they were setting up, and it was taking a long time to set all the cameras up. And I just started kind of panicking about that,” she said at the time.
Bugonia is available to rent or own on digital Nov. 25, then on Blu-ray and DVD on Dec. 23.
