TUCKED INTO A CORNER booth at a seafood restaurant off the Pacific Coast Highway, Emma Stone listens attentively as a waiter with a handlebar mustache describes the evening’s specials: bluenose sea bass, whole branzino, grilled market-price lobster, fresh sea urchin, shellfish stew made with mussels and clams gathered from the ocean we can see out the window. Maybe it’s the candles, but Stone’s green eyes look even bigger than usual as she nods enthusiastically, taking it all in. Then the waiter turns to leave, and the 26-year-old actress lets the facade drop. “I was concentrating so hard on making my face look like I was listening that I totally forgot to listen,” she confesses. “I wasn’t listening at all!”

We’ve just met, but this feels like a very Emma Stone moment. The self-effacement, the goofiness, the slapstick laugh. Stone is a famous person who is very good at not seeming famous. It’s the kind of loose-limbed naturalism that has allowed America to fall for her, starting with her breakout role in 2007’s Superbad all the way to her Oscar-nominated turn in Birdman last year.

Stone lives not far from here, in a half-furnished rental house she’s sharing with her younger brother and Ren, a three-and-a-half-year-old golden retriever–Irish setter mix. She used to live in L.A.—six years ago, in West Hollywood—and recently relocated back from New York. “It feels different being by the water,” she says. “You’d be surprised at how much of life can be taken up by doing yoga and nothing.”

If that sounds a bit lackadaisical, Stone is coming off a very busy year. Last summer she shot a Woody Allen movie—Irrational Man, which opens this July—and then went straight into rehearsals for a three-month stint on Broadway, starring as a coked-up Sally Bowles in Cabaret. Then came Academy Awards season, which she experienced for the first time as a nominee, and then Saturday Night Live’s 40th anniversary special, on which the longtime comedy nerd got to fulfill a childhood fantasy by playing Roseanne Roseannadanna, a character originated by one of her heroes, Gilda Radner. (“It wasn’t great,” Stone says of her performance, “but it was fun.”) When her run on Cabaret ended in February, Stone high-tailed it to California, where she had reshoots on Aloha, a Cameron Crowe movie that opened in May, in which she plays an Air Force F-22 fighter pilot and Bradley Cooper’s love interest. (Crowe calls her “the soul of the movie.”) Now she finally has a couple of months off, which she’s using to relax and ponder the little questions, like what to do with the rest of her career. “I was actually on the phone all day today, trying to put the pieces together,” she says. “When I sit in my house for too long, I think too much—but I really like sitting in my house.”

Stone orders a dozen oysters and a glass of Sancerre, and warns that she can sometimes make interviews tricky. She’s constantly second-guessing herself, wondering how things might look in print, worrying she might change her mind in two hours. “That’s my problem—I just go 20 steps ahead,” she says. On the other hand, her aversion to insincerity and artifice can make for some delightful moments—like the time she was doing a junket for a mascara launch and answered a question about beauty advice with a story about how she’d recently seen the catacombs in Paris and was struck by the thought that we’d all be bones someday. “Everyone at the table, all these 25-year-old women who worked at beauty websites, were just jaws-open horrified,” Stone recalls, laughing. “But it’s true! We’re all going to die, and we’re not going to have faces anymore. So do what you want with your face, because it will be a skull pretty soon.”