Emma Stone admitted the film La La Land brought back memories as her movie character resonated with her life as an inexperienced actress.

Despite these feelings, the star says she’s happy to have opened up about some “horror stories” with her co-stars at the time.

She told The Globe and Mail newspaper: “With ‘Birdman‘, my character was outside the actor’s mind really – she was just his daughter, not totally involved in that world.

But with ‘La La Land’, I had a little more trepidation playing an actress in Los Angeles who was auditioning over and over. It’s pretty close to my exact appearance when I first moved there. It was scary – like, is this going to be too much? But then it quickly became fun because we were all sharing horror stories and dramatising our little traumatic auditions.”

And although her role in the film didn’t remind Emma of any particular audition, it did bring her back to the film Superbad and shared how the casting director assisted her.

The actress added: “It didn’t directly remind me of any single audition I went on where I was, ‘Wow, that might be the one!’ But what it did remind me of was the casting director who put me in ‘Superbad’.

She just had a feeling about me, and she kept bringing me in for things over three years. If it weren’t for her, I don’t know what would’ve happened. But the audition for ‘Superbad’ was pretty different than here – I wasn’t singing a ballad, but, well, there was improvising with Jonah [Hill]. I guess that’s kind of similar.”