The Emma Stone Sex Comedy On Netflix That Will Break Your Funny Bone
Emma Stone has built an entire acting career off of being the cute and relatable “girl next door,” so the last place you’d expect to find her would be in a sex comedy. However, Emma Stone was the featured star of Easy A, which raucously (and sometimes raunchily) adapted a literary classic for modern audiences. If you’re ready for a comedy that will break your funny bone, you can stream the film on Netflix today.
Honestly, the fact that Emma Stone stars in it was already enough reason for us to check out Easy A. But we were surprised and delighted to discover that the film is a modern-day adaptation of the classic Nathaniel Hawthorne novel The Scarlet Letter.
It’s meant to be a little white lie, but that lie soon takes over her life and thrusts her into an often-hilarious world of teen gossip and intrigue.
Like in that classic novel, the plot revolves around a woman who is shamed over sex, though the movie puts an interesting spin on the original story.
In The Scarlet Letter, a woman is forced to wear a scarlet “A” for adultery, which is a constantly visible symbol that she had sex out of wedlock with a man before bearing his child. However, Emma Stone in Easy A is a young high school woman who ends up lying about having sex.
It’s meant to be a little white lie, but that lie soon takes over her life and thrusts her into an often-hilarious world of teen gossip and intrigue.
Even if you’re not a fan of Emma Stone (and first off, how dare you), Easy A is filled with plenty of amazing talent. Her costars include Penn Badgley, Amanda Bynes, and Thomas Haden Church.
If that’s not enough, Stanley Tucci and Fred Armisen help round out one of the most perfectly-cast films we’ve ever seen.
Behind The Scenes of Easy A
In fact, the only thing more compelling than Emma Stone and the rest of her fellow Easy A cast is the bonkers behind-the-scenes stories of how this film was made. For example, screenwriter Bert V. Royal wrote the vast majority of the film in only five days.
However, that script saw many changes: he originally wrote a hard R comedy that gleefully included 47 instances of the F-word, so much of this had to be removed or changed for the film to earn a PG-13 rating.
Long before Emma Stone was even considered for Easy A, the screenwriter had ambitious plans for future movies that never came to fruition. Originally, he wanted to have two other literary adaptations that would take place in the same high school, allowing some of the same characters to appear in different movies.
That’s right: we came close to getting an Easy A cinematic universe in the Marvel style, but it was never meant to be.
While the film is mostly known for its references to The Scarlet Letter, it also contains a few fun references to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, including Emma Stone getting a mohawk while taking a shower.
The reason for this is that the director, Will Gluck, is a huge fan of Ferris director John Hughes. Despite those fun references, though, Emma Stone’s character and Easy A as a film are very different from most of Hughes’s oeuvre.
While it can be a little weird watching Emma Stone and some of her costars playing high school students, Easy A certainly nails the overall high school aesthetic.
That’s because the entire movie was shot in Ojai, California, including shooting most of the scenes at the nearby Nordhoff High School. Home interior scenes were filmed in the actual houses of residents, and the director impressively didn’t have to use any actual sets while filming.
Whether it was due to Emma Stone’s killer performance or the whip-smart writing, Easy A was a critical and commercial hit: it currently has an 85 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and it earned a whopping $75 million against its slinky budget of $8 million.
That’s right: we came close to getting an Easy A cinematic universe in the Marvel style, but it was never meant to be.
The movie was such a success across the board that there was talk in 2019 of giving it a kind of sequel, but since there has been no chatter about that since 2021, we think the project may be dead. Still, the original is one of the best comedies ever made, and you can see what the hype is about by streaming Easy A on Netflix today.
