Emma Stone's Advice to Young Girls: 'All the Power to You'
Stone, 28, won a SAG Award for her role in "La La Land."
-- It was just over one decade ago that a 14-year-old Emma Stone created a PowerPoint presentation that successfully convinced her parents to allow her to move from Arizona to Hollywood at age 15 to fulfill her dreams of being an actress.
On Sunday night, Stone, 28, beat out Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Emily Blunt and Natalie Portman at the 2017 Screen Actors Guild Awards, winning the award for outstanding performance by a female actor in a leading role for “La La Land.”
“It’s a trip,” Stone told ABC News’ Chris Connelly after accepting the award at Los Angeles' Shrine Auditorium. “It’s really overwhelming. It means so much to me.”
Stone has already won a Golden Globe and is nominated for an Oscar for her role in “La La Land,” a musical that follows the characters of Stone and Ryan Gosling as they try to make their show business dreams come true in Los Angeles.
Stone, who moved to New York City eight years ago after living in Los Angeles for six years, said the movie made her see the City of Angels “through new eyes.”
“There were more than 70 locations and we were walking through the city and thinking about how it gives people, you know, it gives people with a dream,” Stone said. “It can make their dreams come true or it can crush part of them and the way this city fuses together, it’s just a wild place.”
Stone has specific advice for young girls who, like her, are looking at LA from afar with big dreams of becoming an actress.
“I really want them to finish high school because I don’t condone necessarily exactly what I did,” Stone said. “I think that being a creative person has been a great gift of my life and I am so grateful that lets me take walls down in myself and explore people and stories.”
She added, “It’s a great thing and anybody that wants to be creative and explore their lives in that way, I’m like, ‘All the power to you.’”