Emma Stone’s casting as Allison Ng, a character of Hawaiian and Asian heritage, in Cameron Crowe’s latest romantic comedy Aloha, received its fair share of criticism when the film opened in May. Crowe went so far as to apologize “to all who felt this was an odd or misguided casting choice” in a blog post. While on a press tour for Woody Allen’s Irrational Man, which opens on Friday, Stone for the first time addressed the controversy in an interview with an Australian news site.

“I’ve become the butt of many jokes,” she said, referring to her role in Aloha. “I’ve learned on a macro level about the insane history of whitewashing in Hollywood and how prevalent the problem truly is. It’s ignited a conversation that’s very important.”

In defense of her casting, she offered: “The character was not supposed to look like her background which was a quarter Hawaiian and a quarter Chinese.”

Made for roughly $40m, Aloha has grossed approximately $20m in the US since opening on 12 July; not a terrible number for a small-scaled romantic comedy, but a poor figure for one starring Stone, Bradley Cooper, Rachel McAdams and Bill Murray, from the writer/director of Jerry Maguire, which grossed over $150m in 1996. The negative reviews Aloha was met with, plus the controversy surrounding Stone’s casting, no doubt played a factor in the film’s disappointing box office performance.

Watch the trailer for Cameron Crowe’s Aloha, which stars Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone and Rachel McAdams Guardian

In addition to discussing the Aloha kerfuffle, Stone spoke of the tendency for Hollywood to cast young women as the romantic interests for much older men. In both Irrational Man and her first film with Allen, Magic in the Moonlight, the 26-year-old actor was paired up with significantly older male co-stars (Joaquin Phoenix in Irrational Man, and Colin Firth in Magic in the Moonlight). The glaring age gaps led Vulture to highlight the “older-man problem” in a series of charts that showed how Stone, and two similarly in-demand actors, Jennifer Lawrence and Scarlett Johansson, are frequently cast opposite middle-aged screen lovers.

“It’s rampant in Hollywood and it’s definitely been that way for a long time, both culturally and in movies,” Stone said. “But in Irrational Man, the film is contingent upon the age difference; the movie is about that disparity. And when I did Magic in the Moonlight Colin Firth and I talked about the gap which was huge, absolutely, because he was born the same year as my dad.”

She continued: “There’s a lot of conversation about how we want to see people represented on screen and what we need to change as a business to reflect culture in a clearer way and not in an idealized way. There are some flaws in the system... My eyes have been opened in many ways this year.”