Emma Stone can still do Steve Martin's f-bomb speech from Planes, Trains And Automobiles
Now, nobody is questioning the parenting style of Emma Stone’s father, let’s just get that straight. After all, the Cruella star has a more than healthy movie career going, a Best Actress Oscar, and a willingness to apologize for accepting roles she had no business playing. Still, as Stone related to Jimmy Kimmel on Thursday, dad wasn’t interested in shielding the young Emma from his favorite R-rated movies in her childhood, regularly screening the Steve Martin oeuvre back from before he was America’s family-friendly father figure. After all, what 8-year-old wouldn’t appreciate The Jerk or Planes, Trains And Automobiles? (Dad’s fondness for sitting down to repeated watches of The Shawshank Redemption might be called into question, but, since it’s on a non-stop loop on cable, it’s not like anyone can escape it.)
Still, all that early Steve Martin exposure clearly left lasting effects on Stone, who, at Kimmel’s prompting, admitted that she’d committed perhaps the most memorable scene from Planes, Trains And Automobiles to memory as an impressionable child. And, since that speech is peppered with more “fucks” per minute than anything outside of Goodfellas, no doubt captive audiences of the young aspiring actress Emma Stone were treated to the undeniably adorable sight of a little girl spitting fire and f-bombs after her airport rental car company left her in the middle of fucking nowhere.
Does Stone remember it still? Just cue up the above clip to 5:45. Put on the spot by Kimmel (in what didn’t seem like a pre-planed bit), Stone centered herself as an irate, no-fucks-given Steve Martin and, with Kimmel essaying the role of the infuriatingly chipper rental car clerk (the great Edie McClurg, if you recall), Stone focused some laser eyes into the computer camera and let the “fucks” fly, verbatim. Basking in the glow of having uttered what Kimmel speculated were the most such “fucks” ever bleeped by the ABC censors, Stone recalled how, as a slightly younger Emma Stone, she’d had the habit of bursting into “completely, head-over-heels insane” tears whenever she ran into one of her childhood comedy idols, including, at one point, Martin. (Bill Murray, Diane Keaton, and Lorne Michaels also struck the budding star into mind-blown weeping.) Nowadays, one can only hope the Oscar winner would fix Martin with a steely gaze and tell him what a big fucking fan she is.