'Bugonia' Made The Decision To Gender Swap Emma Stone’s Character, And The Filmmaker’s Reasons Are Fascinating

Cinema Blend

Bugonia marks the fourth feature that Emma Stone and director Yorgos Lanthimos have made together… but that’s only because of a vital change that was made during the film’s development. The 2025 movie is a remake of the 2003’s Save The Green Planet! from Korean filmmaker Jang Joon-hwan, and among the deviations from the original is a gender-swapped antagonist – which is the character played by Stone. It’s a fascinating choice that ends up having significant consequences on the storytelling, and it was one the filmmakers opted to make for a multitude of reasons.  In the film, a pair of conspiracy theorists (Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis) execute a plan to kidnap a pharmaceutical CEO (Stone) whom they believe is an alien in disguise. The fact that it’s two men abducting a woman impacts both the relationships between the characters and external perspectives on the circumstance – meaning that sexual dynamics are in play, and the door is open for the conversation about misogyny that’s frequently mixed into conspiracy thinking in the modern age. I brought this up while virtually interviewing screenwriter Will Tracy and Yorgos Lanthimos earlier this month during the Bugonia press day, noting the fact that the male leads decide to chemically castrate themselves, and Tracy discussed the impact of the gender swap.

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00:00Yeah, I think you're right. I think that there were, it seemed like the interesting tensions present themselves right there

00:07that, as you said, that there's a different kind of threat or different kind of menace if it's two young

00:17men kidnapping young women.

00:19But then we kind of play to play with that in an interesting way. So we're not saying anything too

00:27specific about who Teddy and Don are, what their proclivities are. And then, you know, also, you know, the character

00:35of Teddy is someone who very much very clearly feels the absence of his mother.

00:39And then there might be something interesting in that dynamic. And also, it just, as she does when, you know,

00:47she's first kidnapped, which, as she says to Teddy, you know, me being a very high-powered female CEO who's

00:56been kidnapped, are the optics of that playing into her?

00:59I think they are, you know. And so that, I think that also plays a bit into their dynamic, right?

01:06That, yes, just, yeah, just the optics of a powerful woman, it's a little different, right?

01:14And so all those things felt maybe culturally interesting to explore. But, yeah, maybe also just on a very basic

01:24level, I feel like, not only in the original film, but in general, you know, if you were to write

01:29a character like this, usually the kind of bog-standard version is, well, high-powered, very powerful CEO, man.

01:37And just assume maybe just interesting to just, without thinking about it too much, I just kind of, if you

01:42flip that, what emerges?

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