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How Emma Stone’s Poor Things Character, Bella Baxter, Came to Life

wmagazine.com · 1,470 words · saved by 1 readers

The film’s hair, makeup, and prosthetics designer Nadia Stacey and costume designer Holly Waddington discuss creating an otherworldly adult baby. In Yorgos Lanthimos’s twisted feminist tale Poor Things, Willem Dafoe plays a scarred (literally and figuratively) Dr. Frankenstein-esque mad scientist named Godwin Baxter, who takes the body of a young woman near death and implants an infant’s brain in her head, turning her into a whole new being. It’s a reanimation tale, a coming-of-age story, a sci-fi epic all rolled into one, with Dafoe’s Godwin as the mastermind of Emma Stone’s experimental character, Bella Baxter. But behind the scenes of the film, there were two other women—the real Dr. Frankensteins, if you will—who brought Stone, Dafoe, and the rest of the fantastical cast to life. “I think Emma said it herself: we were creating a woman from scratch,” hair, makeup, and prosthetics designer Nadia Stacey tells W over Zoom. Yes, Godwin (or God, as Bella affectionately—and naively—calls

Photo by Atsushi Nishijima. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures In Yorgos Lanthimos’s twisted feminist tale Poor Things , Willem Dafoe plays a scarred (literally and figuratively) Dr. Frankenstein-esque mad scientist named Godwin Baxter, who takes the body of a young woman near death and implants an infant’s brain in her head, turning her into a whole new being. It’s a reanimation tale, a coming-of-age story, a sci-fi epic all rolled into one, with Dafoe’s Godwin as the mastermind of Emma Stone ’s experimental character, Bella Baxter. But behind the scenes of the film, there were two other women—

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