Emma Stone wants to be called by her real name, Emily: 'That would be so nice'

"I freaked out a couple of years ago," the actress says. "For some reason, I was like, 'I can't do it anymore. Just call me Emily.'"

Call her by her name?

Oscar-winning actress Emma Stone is opening up about how she took on a new moniker to launch her screen career, and how she still prefers using her real name when possible.

In a new interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Stone and her costar on The Curse, Nathan Fielder, discussed the name she was given and the one she uses on the job. "I'd like to say something," Fielder said near the beginning of the interview. "Her name's Emily, but she goes by Emma professionally. So when there's people that don't know her, I end up saying Emma. But I'm going to just say Emily from here on."

Stone said she still uses Emily with people she knows personally. "When I get to know them, people that I work with do [call me Emily]," she explained. When THR asked the actress if she'd correct a fan if they called her Emily, Stone responded, "No. That would be so nice. I would like to be Emily."

Stone previously told Jimmy Fallon that she wanted to be called Emma growing up because she was a huge fan of Baby Spice, a.k.a. Emma Lee Bunton, of the Spice Girls.

In the THR interview, the actress said she goes by Emma because Emily Stone was already taken by another actor in SAG-AFTRA. "It's just because my name was taken," she said. "Then I freaked out a couple of years ago. For some reason, I was like, 'I can't do it anymore. Just call me Emily.' Nathan calls me Em, which is easier."

SAG-AFTRA rules stipulate that no member of the guild can have the same professional name as an existing member, which has caused numerous performers to adopt stage names when their birth names are already in use. For example, a young actor named Michael Douglas couldn't use his birth name when he joined the guild in the 1970s due to the Wall Street star already using that name, so he adopted a new stage name: Michael Keaton.

He's not the only person who adopted that surname out of necessity: Since Diane Hall was already taken in Actors' Equity, she took her mother's maiden name and became Diane Keaton. Similarly, since her birth name was already taken by the Gia and Lost actress of the same name, another actress named Elizabeth Mitchell opted to go by Elizabeth Banks.

Stone is listed by her birth name, Emily Jean Stone, in the liner notes of Taylor Swift's new album The Tortured Poets Department. The actress is credited with "oddities" on the track "Florida!!!"

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