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:
It seemed like the interesting tensions present themselves right there, that as you said, that there's a different kind of threat or different kind of menace if it's two young men kidnapping a young woman – but then we kind of play with that in an interesting way, so we're not saying anything too specific about who Teddy and Don are, what their proclivities are.
In terms of perspectives on sexuality, Bugonia and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things actually feature some interesting contrasts. In the 2023 film, Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter is liberated by her sexuality, and it leads her to explore the grandness of humanity and our world. In Bugonia, Jesse Plemons’ Teddy Gatz understands himself as a slave to sexual urges, and he makes the decision to chemically castrate both himself and Aidan Delbis’ Don so that they aren’t at “risk” of seduction during their mission.
But sexuality is only one part of it. Without giving too much away, one of the primary reasons that Teddy is doing what he is doing is because of his relationship with his mother (Alicia Silverstone), and that colors the crime in its own way. Will Tracy also brought up the “optics” of the situation, as the world is obviously going to look at the abduction of a woman by two male kidnappers differently than they would the abduction of a man. He continued,
And then, you know, the character of Teddy is someone who very much, very clearly feels the absence of his mother. And then there might be something interesting in that dynamic... when she's first kidnapped, which as she says to Teddy, you know, 'Me being a very high powered female CEO who's been kidnapped. Are the optics of that playing in here? I think they are.' I think that also plays a bit into their dynamic, right? Just the optics of a powerful woman, it's a little different, right?
That’s a lot… but there is even more to it as well. “CEO of a pharmaceutical company” is a job disproportionately (albeit not exclusively) held by men, and Will Tracy liked the idea of not making what could be perceived as the most obvious choice for the character. He added,
Just on a very basic level, I feel like not only in the original film, but in general, if you were to write a character like this, usually the kind of the kind of bog-standard version as well, very powerful CEO: man. And just maybe without thinking about it too much, if you flip that, what emerges?
Care to find out? After earning critical acclaim from its festival debuts this fall, Bugonia arrived in limited theaters this past weekend, but it is expanding to wide release just in time for Halloween this Friday (and it’s a fitting screening option, if you’re curious).
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