“I’m not brave any more darling."-Hemingway

The best audition I ever did was for Spider-Man. It was what made me want to do the movie. I loved doing the screen-test because it was just Andrew and I getting to play around together; it was wonderful.

It was on the first Spider-Man that Stone met her longtime boyfriend, the actor Andrew Garfield, who, if all the rumors are to be believed, recently became her ex-boyfriend. Their relationship status is a subject of such fervent speculation that just yesterday, when Stone was caught by paparazzi leaving their shared stylist’s office with a paper bag labeled Andrew Garfield, the resulting photographs launched a thousand blog posts. Was she returning her ex’s things post-breakup? Doing a favor for the guy who’s still her boyfriend? Or just messing with everybody? “See, I never talk about this stuff for this exact reason—because it’s all so speculative and baseless,” Stone says. “Once you start responding—once you’re like, ‘No, that’s not true’—then they’re like, ‘Well, if we push enough, we’ll get a comment, so let’s see what else we can make up.’ I understand the interest in it completely,” she adds, “because I’ve had it, too. But it’s so special to me that it never feels good to talk about, so I just continually don’t talk about it.” That said, she admits: She could have easily flipped the bag around to hide his name. “Yeah,” Stone says, with the hint of a smile. “When I picked up the bag, I was like, ‘This is kind of funny if there are any [paparazzi] out there.’ There’s probably some rebelliousness that comes out in me after all these stories and people texting you for weeks about something that, for the most part, is not true. But even when it’s false, I would rather just let it be false.

Family is part of “home”, but the meaning of the word isn’t just “those you love.” It’s “those that you don’t love that you have to find home with.