Emma Stone Had to Go to Speech Therapy to Make Her Voice More Feminine
Emma Stone has always been known for her unique voice, but the Easy A star once sounded even deeper than she does now. So much so that she needed professional help to change it.
Emma Stone revealed where her raspy voice came from
Stone confided that there was a simple explanation behind her deep voice. It all came down to the actor crying excessively back when she was still a baby.
“My mom dealt with a screaming baby 24 hours a day for the first six months of my life – I screamed myself hoarse every day and developed nodules as an infant,” Stone once said at a press conference according to Your Next Shoes. “So I have calluses on my vocal cords, which makes me lose my voice all the time and makes doing something like screaming in a scene, over and over, really rough, because then I lose my voice for, like, a week. So I’m always trying to be pretty protective of it, but, yeah – I’ve sounded like this since I was a kid.”
The La La Land star also quipped that she had no intentions of changing her voice, although it seemed to have no bearing on her career nowadays anyway.
“Nobody’s ever really said I was getting a part because of my voice, but it’s the only one I’ve got so I’m sticking with it,” she said.
But Stone already had to have her voice changed in her much younger years. In a 2009 interview with The Orange County Register, she shared that she sounded a bit too masculine back then.
“It used to be even lower,” Stone said. “I was like five, and I’d be going: ‘Hey, mom’ and sound like a grown man. It was so bad that it gave me nodules by the time I was 11, and I had to go to speech therapy. They taught me to speak higher, but I was screaming last night so this is exactly how I sounded when I was a kid.”
Emma Stone originally couldn’t get cast in movies because of her voice
Stone’s voice may not be a hindrance to her career now, but that wasn’t the case when she was still an aspiring actor. The Cruella actor took a gamble when she fled to Hollywood in her teenage years, moving into an apartment with her mom. The actor faced three years worth of rejections, but her mother was instrumental in helping her persevere.
“Sometimes I felt lonely but my mother was so good and supportive so I felt very safe and supported and that gave me confidence I needed to go to auditions and deal with all the rejection and the fear of not being able to make it,” Stone once said according to OK Pakistan. “But I never gave up and slowly I was able to build my career.”
One of the reasons Stone was rejected so much was because of her voice. Even after getting speech therapy, many felt she still sounded older than her age. But it was a problem that Stone felt worked to her benefit.
“Nobody wanted to hire a 15-year-old actress with a deep and raspy voice. I sounded much older than I looked and I hated my voice at the time. But in another way I was glad I sounded older – because I never liked the idea of being a child. I was a precocious child and I couldn’t wait to be an adult. And at one point my voice really began to fit with who I am,” she said.
Her three-year losing streak eventually ended when she was cast in Superbad.
“It was like standing in the middle of an empty field, hitting an ax into the ground and having oil pop out,” she said of being cast. “I couldn’t believe how lucky I was. It was like the greatest thing that ever happened to me.”
