Emma Stone time travels to the year she was born

A Scotsman’s dream with her red hair and emerald eyes, self-possessed and slyly jocular Emma Stone grabs an outdoor seat at a Johnny Rockets in West Hollywood. She doesn’t need a menu; she has it memorized. “It’s my favorite restaurant,” the 20-year-old comic actress says as she tops off her order with a peanut butter-vanilla malt.

When she says she’s currently reading Kurt Vonnegut’s “Player Piano” on her Kindle, she immediately dissipates any whiff of pretension by repeating mellifluously: “I’m reading Kurt Vonnegut and listening to Neutral Milk Hotel.” Confirming her status as a fetching techie, she admits the story is true about the PowerPoint presentation she crafted to persuade her parents to let her move from Arizona to Hollywood.

“It wasn’t like a professional-level, great-looking PowerPoint. There were cartoons in it,” and smooth transitions. “Other than that, it was not that great,” she says, also admitting to a fondness for designing Web pages for fun.

“I never did anything really crazy. I tried to dabble in Flash for a while, but that was a little too hard for me. I’m pretty good with HTML and I can understand Javascript. I can do the view source.”

That thud you just heard was the collective fainting of nerd America.

As to her day job, Stone’s string of prominent roles in Hollywood comedies continues with the Matthew McConaughey-Jennifer Garner rom-com spin on “A Christmas Carol,” “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.”

“I’m playing 15 in 1988, which was the year I was born,” she says of her role as a girlie, ghostly guide. “A lot of the lines were written in all caps with exclamation points. I went in, I was 19, so I thought I was too old for it. ‘I’ll just go for it.’ So I went nuts in the room. I guess they thought it was funny, so I just did that in the movie.

“On film, you don’t really get to throw buckets at the audience. It’s as if you’re having a conversation with them, they’re so close to you. In theater, which I did before I did this, I loved getting to be really loud and wild, and this kind of gave me the opportunity to do that on film, which is pretty rare, for me, anyway.”

So the outrageousness was no hurdle for Stone. But the wardrobe took a leap of faith.

“The hair was fantastic, really fun. The costumes . . . ,” she says, shaking her head at her character’s “Flashdance”-Brat Pack-”Let’s Get Physical” look. “I didn’t realize people really dressed like that, and they were like, ‘You have no idea, child.’ She’s goofy anyway, so let’s go for the pink leg warmers and the Jordache acid-wash. And there it was.”

Despite her lack of ‘80s bona fides, her musical memory hardly begins with the Ricky Martins of the world. She declares a recent outing “the greatest night in the history of history” -- when asked why, her mouth spreads into a Cheshire grin.

“Because Woody Harrelson took Kat Dennings and I to Paul McCartney’s house for dinner. That’s the night I met Paul McCartney,” she says. The Beatles, it turns out, are her all-time favorite band, McCartney’s “Blackbird” her all-time favorite song.

“I found out about two hours before -- it was our last day of shooting on ‘Zombieland’ -- and everyone I called, I said, ‘Guess where I am going for dinner, and you cannot shoot high enough.’ People were like, ‘Diane Keaton?’ because she’s my hero, and I’m like, ‘Keep shooting.’ I mean, it’s crazy, right?

“He made veggie burgers. Himself. Grilled ‘em. It was surreal. I felt like I was dreaming the whole time. He said the word ‘Liverpool,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, he said, “Liverpool!” That is so cool.’ ”

And with that, the Johnny Rockets server leaves a dish with a smiley face drawn with ketchup. Once he passes earshot, she smirks wickedly and says, “I’m going to annihilate his smiley face.”

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Where you’ve seen her

After winning the role of Laurie Partridge on the VH1 “reality” show “The New Partridge Family” (which went no further than the pilot), Emma Stone made a series of TV appearances culminating in a main role in the short-lived Fox series “Drive.” Since breaking through to the big screen as Jonah Hill’s crush in “Superbad” (2007), she has costarred in “The Rocker” with Rainn Wilson and “The House Bunny” with Anna Faris and Kat Dennings. In “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past” with Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Garner and Michael Douglas, she plays a lusty spectral representation of a girl from McConaughey’s teen years. Also slated for 2009: the horror-comedy (“zombedy,” she calls it) “Zombieland” with Woody Harrelson and “Paper Man” with Jeff Daniels.