How Old Bella Is In Poor Things

There’s been a lot of controversy surrounding Bella Baxter’s age in Poor Things – particularly her mental age, given that she has the mind of a child – but how old is she in the movie? Poor Things begins with a pregnant woman named Victoria taking her own life. Shortly thereafter, Willem Dafoe’s “God” revives her by putting the brain of Victoria’s unborn fetus in her head, resulting in his most prized creation: Bella Baxter. Throughout the film, Bella’s brain develops so rapidly that it’s hard to pin down her mental age.

Emma Stone won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her daring portrayal of Bella. With her performance as a child in an adult’s body, Stone did things that no other actor has ever even attempted to do. By throwing herself wholeheartedly into the role and trusting director Yorgos Lanthimos’ vision, Stone was able to deliver something truly special. In each of her scenes, it’s clear that Bella looks a lot older than she is, but it’s not entirely obvious just how old she is.

Victoria Is Around 30 Years Old When She Takes Her Own Life In Poor Things

Emma Stone was 32 years old when filming

At the beginning of Poor Things, when a pregnant Victoria takes her own life, she’s around 30 years old. Her age is never explicitly stated, but that’s the ballpark figure. Victoria’s age more or less lines up with Stone’s own age during filming. Poor Things was shot in Hungary and it was in production from August to December of 2021. Stone was 32 years old when filming started, but she was 33 by the time the shoot ended. Stone celebrated her 33rd birthday on November 6, 2021, about a month before filming wrapped.

In the Victorian era, when Poor Things takes place, it was common for wealthy women to be educated and married by the time they turned 18, and the peak of physical condition was considered to be around 25, so Victoria is quite old for a new mother by those historical standards. These milestones depended on a person’s social status, but Victoria’s husband Alfie is shown to be quite wealthy. People were thought to be past their prime by age 30 in the Victorian era, so it’s interesting that this is the age that Victoria gets a fresh start as Bella.

Bella Begins Poor Things As An Infant

Bella becomes her own daughter… and mother.

When Godwin takes on medical student Max McCandless as his assistant, Bella is still in the very early stages of her mental and physical development. In these scenes, she’s very clearly characterized with baby-like attributes, like peeing on the floor and not knowing how to eat properly. At this point, she’s still trying to grasp the basic human functions. While she looks like an adult, she walks and talks like a toddler.

Stone and Lanthimos have spoken at length about how they charted Bella’s development throughout the film (via USA Today). They broke down Bella’s journey into five different stages of development and determined how she would move and how she would speak at each of these five stages. Since they had to shoot Bella’s scenes out of order – that’s the nature of film production – these five stages gave the director and his star a useful shorthand to navigate her development at different points in the story.

In a sense, Bella is both her own daughter and her own mother. She has the brain of the daughter and the body of the mother, so depending on the perspective, she’s both her own daughter and mother. Stone described Bella as “a creature of her own making,” which presented a lot of interesting challenges because she has no past experiences that formed who she is – she’s figuring out who she is as she goes along.

How Much Bella Ages Across Poor Things

How old is she by the end?

Although it’s unclear how long Poor Things’ timeline is, Bella seems to have aged significantly by the end of the film. Bella’s development is contrasted with Margaret Qualley’s character Felicity, the next young woman that Godwin experiments on. Felicity matures a lot slower than Bella did, making Bella’s rapid maturity even more of an oddity.

In Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name, which the film was based on, Bella has a mental age of around seven years old when she and the sleazy lawyer Duncan Wedderburn start having sex. Based on screenwriter Tony McNamara’s faithfulness to the book, the movie’s timeline likely isn’t all that different. By the end of the movie adaptation of Poor Things, Bella has clearly aged from her infant state in the early scenes to a state of self-acceptance and self-actualization.