After kicking off her movie career in Superbad as the high-school hottie throwing the cool party, Emma Stone is rapidly carving a niche for herself as a young actress with good comic chops. Her latest outing is the fright-com Zombieland, in which she plays one of four human survivors (with Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson and Abigail Breslin) blowing away zombies in America. Rotten Tomatoes meets up with an actress who, as she explains, was instructed to move to LA by a voice in her head…

How did you hook up with Zombieland?

Emma Stone: I read the script and told my agent I loved it and then I auditioned with a lot of other very cool actresses who probably would have been way better for the part than me. I auditioned with Jesse — we did some improv together. I knew he was going to be amazing in the movie.
Did you find anything challenging about it?

ES: I had never done any action before and I’m not very good at running so that was hard. I kept injuring myself. Other than that, it was just fun — learning how to shoot guns and pretending to be a bad-ass.
What was your favourite part?

ES: I got to shoot a lot of zombies but my favourite thing was to watch Abigail shooting them. She is way more bad-ass than any 12-year-old I’ve ever met. Needless to say, there were nights that it was incredibly scary and you’re being chased by 30 ravenous extras dressed as zombies.
Come on. You weren’t really scared, were you?

ES: Yeah! On the second day, Abbie and I had to be chased by something like 30 zombies and it was two o’clock in the morning and I was really overtired. I started getting these paranoid thoughts that one of them was really crazy. I was like, How do you know you can trust these people?! So we’re running from these people and shooting at them and in my mind I’m thinking, What if one of them snaps and attacks me? I got myself into a paranoid tizzy about it.

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“Zombieland” has made $25 Million in its first weekend of release, which places it on #1 on this week’s box office chart!

Estimated Top 10 North America October 2-4 2009
Film (Dist) / Est wkd gross / Est total to date

1 (-) Zombieland (Sony) SPRI $25m –

2 (1) Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs (Sony) SPRI $16.7m $82.4m

3 (-) Toy Story / Toy Story 2 (3D) (Buena Vista) WDSMPI $12.5m –

4 (-) The Invention Of Lying (Warner Bros) UPI $7.35m –

5 (2) Surrogates (Buena Vista) WDSMPI $7.34m $26.4m

= 6 (-) Whip It (Fox Searchlight) Mandate Int’l $4.85m –

= 6 (31) Capitalism: A Love Story (Overture) Paramount Vantage Int’l $4.85m $5.3m

8 (3) Fame (MGM) Lakeshore Entertainment $4.8m $16.6m

9 (4) The Informant! (Warner Bros) WBPI $3.8m $26.6m

10 (7) Love Happens (Universal) UPI $2.8m $18.9m

If you are skeptical of a movie titled Zombieland, join the club. So was Woody Harrelson when his agent sent him the script.

Harrelson had just been in No Country For Old Men, the 2007 Academy Award Best Picture, which looked pretty good on his already hefty résumé. True, since then he had co-starred in Surfer, Dude,but still, could his career have collapsed so fast?

“I was like, ‘Zombies, man? Has it come to that?’ ”

Harrelson and his Zombieland co-star, Jesse Eisenberg (Roger Dodger), both laugh loudly at that, but the actor is not kidding about his Zombieland hesitation.

“I didn’t read the script for a long time. My agent kept pressuring me, ‘Woody, read the friggin’ script.’ I thought there’s no way this could be anything but stupid.”

Not that stupid hasn’t worked wonders for plenty of zombie movies, but in Zombieland the emphasis is on comedy. A plaguelike disease has turned 99.99 percent of humanity into hungry droolers with a taste for — need we say? — human flesh.

See, you’re laughing already.

Most horror comedies are slapstick or broad parody, but Zombieland goes for an unusual mix of ghoulishly homicidal dark humor — lots of splattering zombies in imaginative ways — and unexpectedly sentimental character comedy. There’s even a sweet story of young love thrown in for anyone not into zombie smashing.

“I wanted it to not be too broad,” Harrelson says. “Although generally I do go over the top in anything, admittedly.”

We’re sitting on the mezzanine balcony of the Driskill Hotel, just hours before a Zombieland screening at Austin’s Fantastic Fest film festival. Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer and co-star Emma Stone are here, too. It’s a pleasant day, and Harrelson prefers the outside air to air conditioning. The zombies on the street below don’t realize we’re up here.

(It doesn’t have anything to do with zombies, but even before we sat down, Texas-born Harrelson bursts out with, “My first job was delivering papers for the Houston Chronicle. That would have been around 1970-1972.”)

In the film, Eisenberg plays Columbus, a lovable nerd who is one of the world’s last uninfected humans. Columbus stumbles on another survivor, Tallahassee (Harrelson), obsessed with finding the world’s last remaining Twinkies. That’s not a euphemism; he really craves those spongy, cream-filled cakes. He also lives to destroy zombies. It’s not a perfect partnership, but in Zombieland you can’t be picky about your friends.

“They needed someone to augment Jesse’s character because obviously Columbus is more nervous about things, a very sensitive character.” Harrelson says. “It kind of helps to have someone more bombastic. Tallahassee is a bad-ass dude who likes to kill zombies.”

Columbus and Tallahassee — everyone in the movie is named for their favorite town — meet up with two smart con-gal sisters, Wichita (Stone of Superbad and The House Bunny) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin of Little Miss Sunshine). Soon they are all on the road together, trying to avoid zombies in their search for Twinkies and a better place to live.

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Long before her family moved to Newport Beach, Emma Stone was just another 14-year-old suburban teen growing up in Scottsdale, Ariz.

And, like many 14-year-olds growing up in Scottsdale, she desperately wanted to get out of Scottsdale.

In her case, she wanted to move to Los Angeles to be closer to the entertainment industry. She had appeared in numerous school plays and local theater productions, and wanted to try to start a movie career.

Unlike most 14-year-olds, however, she made her case to her parents without the usual whining, crying and temper tantrums. She made a PowerPoint presentation. Apparently, it was a really good presentation because she and her mother immediately took up residence in California and, after three years of frustrating auditions, she was cast in the hit comedy “Superbad.” She followed it with roles in “The Rocker,” “The House Bunny” and “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.” She also stars in “Paperman,” which debuted at the recent L.A. Film Festival.

Her sixth film, the horror-comedy “Zombieland,” opens Friday.

Stone plays the older sister of Oscar nominee Abigail Breslin (“Little Miss Sunshine”), two survivors of a deadly virus that has turned most of the world’s population into flesh-eating zombies. Hey, it could happen.

The sisters join forces with two other survivors, Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg, for a road trip to California, vanquishing an army of zombies along the way.

Although only 20, Stone has a sexy, throaty voice reminiscent of an early Lauren Bacall, and she is still young enough to talk freely without a hint of self-censorship. In this interview, which took place on the Santa Monica Pier within the shadow of the giant Ferris wheel, the young actress explained the PowerPoint presentation, where she got that voice and how she rates her zombies against more traditional zombies.

ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER: I apologize for asking a question that you’ve probably been answering all day but …

EMMA STONE: My favorite zombie kill?

Q. Not even close.

A. Oh, because that’s what everybody’s been asking.

Q. No, I want to know about the PowerPoint presentation.

A. Why are so many people fascinated by that?

Q. It’s not every day that we run into a 14-year-old girl who tries to convince her parents to let her move to Hollywood with a PowerPoint presentation. Besides, there isn’t a lot of information about you on the Web, except for that story.

A. Yeah, I know. That’s pretty cool that there aren’t a billion rumors about me on the Internet.

Q. That’s true; I haven’t heard of a single scandal about you.

A. Hooray. That’s the goal.

Q. I think the fascination also stems from the fact that it sounds like a very brave thing to do for a 14-year-old.

A. It didn’t seem that brave. I knew how to use PowerPoint and I figured it was the best way to make my point. I gave them some popcorn, sat them down in my room and I made my case.

Q. What was the argument you presented?

A. Just that I wanted to move to L.A. to pursue acting. I had done 16 plays, and I was washed over with this overpowering feeling that I had to go. I never even liked L.A. that much, but I felt I had to go there. It had to be right then, or it would never happen.

Q. Was it an intellectual decision, or a gut decision?

A. Totally gut. I don’t know why I had to do it, but I did.

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Emma Stone made a big splash in Superbad and now forever earns her place in geekdom’s collective heart with today’s release of Zombieland. As those who’ve seen the film well know, not only is Stone gorgeous and talented in the role of zombie holocaust survivor/grifter Wichita, she’s also pretty funny. I caught up with her last week on the Santa Monica Pier (which, by the way, is exactly where I plan to interview all actresses, just before taking them on the Ferris Wheel), at last week’s Zombieland press junket. Check out our conversation after the jump.

Warning: Read no further if you’ve not yet seen Zombieland and don’t want to spoil some of the surprises it has in store for you.

Zombieland is such a fun and sweet horror comedy that it reminds me a little of Ghostbusters. Without giving too much away, there’s a great little Ghostbusters homage in this film. Were you a fan? Because your part, in particular, in this homage can be best appreciated by the hardcore Ghostbusters fan.

It’s hard for me to talk about because I can’t really talk about that particular moment. These are my father’s heroes, ever since I was seven. I’ve been watching these movies and I was in absolute heaven. It was really not too shabby. It was, like, the coolest two days of my life.

Were you also a zombie fan?

I didn’t know too much about the zombie genre. I’m such a wuss. I’m bad with horror. I’m always covering my eyes and jumping. And it’s funny because in our movie, I was in it, I was there. I saw the prosthetics and the fake broken bones, so even when I watch it in a comedy sense I’m so squeamish. I feel very it very strongly. So it’s hard for me to watch things like that. What drew me to this movie was the comedy aspect of it, not really the zombies. The zombies felt like the perfume of the movie.

The garnish.

The garnish. It didn’t feel like it was a zombie movie. It was like the salad with the main course. Of course, the zombie kills are so badass, and the actual preparation of reacting to zombies… Ruben Fleischer, the director, gave us each baskets of movies. He gave me, Kill Bill – bad ass females; I love Kill Bill. And he gave me the Dawn of the Dead remake. I finally saw that, which was amazing, and 28 Weeks Later and Paper Moon.

Paper Moon?

Because they’re con artists.

That was pretty smart.

Yeah. That was the way I practiced. With those kinds of movies.

This film offers the possibility of a sequel.

Oh, I dream.

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Emma Stone was first introduced to audiences as one of the hot chicks from Superbad. The object of schlubby Jonah Hill’s affection, she was the out-of-your-league girl, who in the end, didn’t care about looks. She liked a guy with a good sense of humor, because she turned out to be pretty funny herself. Since then, Stone has avoided the hot girl typecast, appearing in roles that have actually called for her to dumb down her beauty, in such films as The House Bunny and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past that played up her considerable comic abilities. Now the 21-year-old actress, who recently made the movie from L.A. to New York, is slinging a shotgun in Zombieland, that movie you may have heard about with the greatest cameo of all time. We caught up with Stone recently to talk about her new film, her dream job, and food from south of the border.

So I hear you just moved to New York? Whereabouts?
The Village

I was in the Village the other day and the whole thing was shut off because Obama was there.
Oh, I know. You couldn’t walk anywhere. It was insane. I had to get a taxi that day to go uptown, and I was like, “Fuck!” It took an hour, it was horrible.

It’s been a goal of yours to get to Hollywood and be in the movies since you were a young girl. Now that you’re actually doing it, does it feel like you’re literally living the dream?
Well, it’s kind of funny, because the dream was not actually movies since I was young—it was sketch-comedy. I wanted to do comedy, and then I thought I wanted to do theater, so I wanted to do musical theater, and then I took voice lessons for like eight years, and I sucked at singing, so I was like, “Alright, nevermind.”

You don’t sing now, because on your Wikipedia page it says you do?
Oh, well, I’m releasing my third album next week, so like, whatever, I do sort of sing. No really, I’m not tone deaf but I’m not a singer by any stretch. But, I did just have to sing in something so I don’t know what I’m saying.

In Easy A?
In Easy A. Oh my god, like, what? You know everything!

I did my research for about 30 minutes this morning.
So yeah, one day I just really was like, “I think I have to go to L.A.”

And did you actually make a Power Point presentation to convince your parents to let you move?
Yes, I did.

What was on it?
Oh God. It was so silly. I was like fourteen. It had the Madonna song “Hollywood.” It was ridiculous, like, I used alliteration.

Were you trying to prove a point to them?
A power-point? I was trying to prove the point that I needed to move to Hollywood and be an actor in movies. Yeah, I guess it is pretty crazy that I’m actually able to do that now.

Did you beat out a lot of actresses for this role? Because I interviewed Jesse a few weeks ago for the magazine—he gets to be in the magazine by the way, you’re only online.
Unbelievable.

He said that it came down to him and somebody else.
Oh, I’ve got a little story, but I can’t divulge.

Is this a role you desperately wanted?
I really wanted it, but there were people much cooler than me that might have gotten it.

So how happy were you when you got it?
I was incredibly happy, I couldn’t believe it was happening. I was shocked that they decided to go that way—to go this way. My hair looked like—I look like I can’t even lift a gun. I don’t know what they were thinking.

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Actress Emma Stone stopped by the studio to talk about her role as Wichita in the new movie Zombieland.

The post-apocalyptic zombie comedy is about a lone band of survivors fighting the living dead while they cross the nation. America has been struck by a zombie plague and the group stop by an abandoned amusement park, where they believe they will be safe. Stone’s co-stars include Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg and Abigail Breslin.

A native of Scottsdale, Arizona, Stone got her big break as Violet Trimble on the TV series Drive, which lead to her role as Jules in the smash hit Superbad. Her other acting credits include The Rocker, The House Bunny and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.

Zombieland opens October 2. For more information, visit www.zombieland.com

From WPIX

“The thing about zombies is they’re conceivable. I don’t really know vampires, in a real world, if those kind of people can really exist, because they don’t breathe anything. Zombies could really happen. It could be a plague or an outbreak and it’s conceivable that people could turn into crazy flesh-eating monsters at any given moment. So it’s almost a little scarier. Vampires are a little more fantastical and fun to think about, but I don’t think they could actually happen. Zombies could.”

-”Zombieland” star Emma Stone on why zombies frighten her more than vampires — and which ones she believes in more. The 20-year-old actress (“Superbad,” “The House Bunny”) stars alongside Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson and Abigail Breslin in the new splatter comedy opening tomorrow (Friday). “Zombieland” also features one of the greatest cameos of all time (a cameo that was supposed to go to the late Patrick Swayze) and lots of “Shaun of the Dead”-esque horror comedy. It’s a busy month for Stone, who is not only opening “Zombieland” this week but also has the comedy “Paper Man” (which also stars Jeff Daniels and Ryan Reynolds) coming to the Hamptons International Film Festival next week.

From MTV