Emma Stone had her head shaved to play a CEO kidnapped because she's believed to be an alien bent on Earth's destruction in the dark comedy "Bugonia."
Jesse Plemons sports longer-than-normal locks as a conspiracy theorist beekeeper in "Bugonia."
A high-powered CEO (Emma Stone) gets kidnapped when some conspiracy theorists believe she's an alien in "Bugonia."

If you’re going to shave Emma Stone’s head on camera, it's best to get it right the first time.

The two-time Oscar best-actress winner brings baldness back in a big way with director Yorgos Lanthimos’ dark comedy “Bugonia” (in select theaters Oct. 24, nationwide Oct. 31). Following their previous collaborations “The Favourite,” “Poor Things” and “Kinds of Kindness,” Stone stars in the new film as Michelle Fuller, a high-powered CEO of a biomedical corporation who a couple of conspiracy-theory cousins believe is an alien bent on world domination.

Early in the film, Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis) forcefully kidnap Michelle, and Teddy has Don shave her head so she can’t communicate with her mothership.

In the scene, Michelle is unconscious. In real life, Stone was “just sort of meditating there, telling myself to stay still because if I opened my eyes or flinched, it would really mess things up,” says the actress.

Filming the scene stressed Stone and her director, however. Because Lanthimos knew he had “one chance to do it properly,” the director says he outfitted the car with four different cameras “just to make sure none of them like jammed.” The additional time for setting up led to Stone having the “slightest cold feet.”

“They kept saying, ‘We’ll be ready in 10 minutes. Nah, actually 30 minutes. No, actually an hour,’ ” Stone recalls. “I was sitting there, building the anticipation. So I had a little last-minute freak, and then Yorgos came over, we talked, and I was like, ‘I’m going to be fine. It's going to be great.’ And I absolutely loved it.”

Adds Lanthimos: “I was trying to convince her to maintain it because it looks amazing.”

Plemons, Stone’s costar in “Kinds of Kindness,” admits to “being maybe more nervous" than Stone was. “Wow, Emily's really committing here, so I better do my job,” he says with a laugh. (Stone uses her given name Emily with friends and costars.) “I better bring it. It’s go time.”

Stone did have one important piece of prep work beforehand: She made sure her 4-year-old daughter, Louise Jean, was “very ready” to see her bald “so it's not super-scary. It's such a major transformation,” the actress says. “I just said, ‘I’m going to shave my head. I'm going to take my hair off and it's going to grow back. Isn't that so silly and fun? We can do whatever we want with our hair! It can change all the time.’ She's like, ‘OK,’ and then was totally cool.”

Plemons figures it probably took his two sons – Ennis, 7, and James, 4 – a while to get used to his longer-than-usual hair for “Bugonia.” “It took me a while,” he says. “I had no idea how to care for it, which is obvious I guess when you watch the film.”

The Oscar-nominated actor went to work on director Alejandro Iñárritu’s upcoming still-untitled film right after “Bugonia,” and the filmmaker wanted Plemons’ hair to be dyed redder. “It was pretty poofy and another strong hair look,” he says. Once he got home, he had trouble washing it out and returning to his natural hair color. "I had all these treatments done and then it was close, and then a week later it would come back. Like a virus.”

Stone concurs: “Yeah, red's brutal.”

Plemons’ kids “knew that I was sort of insecure about my hair, and so they just gave me so much s---,” he says. “Like I would be in public and Ennie would (lift) my hat and go, ‘Why's your hair so red?’ ”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The genius way Emma Stone prepped daughter for her 'super-scary' hair change in 'Bugonia'

Reporting by Brian Truitt, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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