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For a girl who trades on easy-going charm, Emma Stone's inexorable rise over the past year seems to be the result of precision plotting. This is the actress who, aged 15, gave her parents a PowerPoint presentation entitled Project Hollywood, to convince them to let her drop out of school and move to Los Angeles. When casting directors kept sending the naturally blonde Stone for entirely inappropriate cheerleader-type roles, she dyed her hair brown – and then, when she was cast in her first film, Superbad, turned herself into a redhead: anything to stand out from the crowd.
You have to say it's worked. Still only 22, Stone has just seen the back of a remarkable summer. First, there have been two bona fide hits – the Steve Carell comedy Crazy, Stupid, Love (global box office $136m and counting) and The Help, the adaptation of the best-selling novel by Kathryn Stockett that's the sleeper hit of the season (taking $164m in the US alone). Then there was that watershed in any actor's career, a cover shoot for Vanity Fair – in a particularly fetching striped bikini. "It still boggles my mind," she reflects, widening those almond-shaped green eyes. "It feels like it didn't really happen. You think: 'Why me?'"
She even laid the groundwork for what will surely be the biggest hit of her career to date with a visit to San Diego's Comic-Con (or "the Con", as she calls it) ahead of the release of next year's blockbuster reboot The Amazing Spider-Man, co-starring Britain's Andrew Garfield as the web-spinning superhero. A veteran of the famed fanboy convention – "it wasn't my first rodeo," she laughs, explaining she went for 2009's horror-comedy Zombieland – she enthuses about the fans who welcomed her casting as love interest Gwen Stacy. "That kind of passion is one of the most fun reasons to be involved with something like Spider-Man
