Brilliantly Blunt
With
Emily Blunt
From her Oscar-nominated performance in Oppenheimer and heart-wrenching turn in upcoming release The Smashing Machine to reprising her iconic role in The Devil Wears Prada 2, EMILY BLUNT is at the top of her game – yet still delightfully down to earth. She talks to TYLER McCALL about family, friendship and the zen rituals that keep her centered in Hollywood’s fast lane
It turns out that Emily Blunt is the friend you let order for the table. We’re tucked away from the blistering New York August heat in the cool basement bar at Sip & Guzzle, the West Village hotspot where Blunt is something of a regular. I’ve copied her order of a margarita (no salt, made with a nice Reposado) and something on the menu called the Bikini: jamón and Comté cheese melted between two razor-thin slices of stroopwafel. It’s perfect.
“I dream about it. It’s so simple, it’s divine,” Blunt says, tearing off a piece of her sandwich. “John’s gonna be so jealous that I had one of these.”
Blunt is so funny, so easy to talk to that it feels like catching up with a girlfriend – albeit an Oscar-nominated friend who is currently in between filming for the most-talked-about movie in production, The Devil Wears Prada 2. (“Of course, I’m not allowed to talk about it,” she jokingly moans – though, like any good girlfriend, she does dish some on the highly anticipated sequel to the hit that launched her career.) And the aforementioned John is fellow actor John Krasinski, her husband of over a decade – and who Blunt, a native Londoner, now lives with in New York along with their two daughters.
That ability to connect is surely part of the formula that has made Blunt one of the best actors of her generation. Whether she’s playing the uber-bitchy assistant to a demanding editrix or the steel-spined wife of a history-changing physicist, as she did in her Academy Award-recognized turn in Oppenheimer, she is always able to find the humanity in her characters that makes the viewer feel as though we know them.
“These PEOPLE are still living, and you’re holding the beating hearts of their lives on a SCREEN. You just want to do right by these people who have LIVED through a lot”
It’s a magic trick she pulls off again in A24’s upcoming film The Smashing Machine. Blunt plays Dawn Staples, the beleaguered girlfriend of Dwayne Johnson’s UFC fighter Mark Kerr, through dizzying highs and devastating lows. While Blunt has played real people before, this is the first time she’s played someone who is still living – but thankfully, the real-life Dawn was generous with her time and, like Blunt, very open to finding a connection. “My empathy for her was vast because it’s a cage, addiction, and she was in it with him. I was really drawn to being her advocate in such a machismo-dominant world,” Blunt says.
At one moment, you want to hug Dawn, and the next you want to shake her. But every scene is in service of creating a full, realistic picture of a woman struggling through a codependent relationship – from the love to the lows and everything in between.
“I was very challenged by playing someone who didn’t seem to be the movie version of the girlfriend, and this didn’t seem to be a movie version of a relationship. It was the full weather system,” Blunt explains. “You know you’re gonna have to rip your rib cage open on something like this, and it’s quite scary to put your feet to the fire: am I gonna do it justice? And the other fear is that these people are still living, and you’re holding the beating hearts of their lives on a screen. You just want to do right by these people who have lived through a lot.”
Fortunately, Blunt was working with Johnson, who has been a close friend and co-star of hers for years. They both disappear into their roles – Johnson with the help of prosthetics, Blunt with the help of long nails and a fake tan – and as gratifying as the experience was for Blunt, she’s doubly pleased for him.
“I think this has been life-changing for him. This is a man who’s never allowed to disappear, and it’s so moving for me as his friend, and as an actor, to watch someone discover what they’re capable of,” she says, with a smile. “I’ve always felt this about Dwayne: there’s this well of life experience and pain and struggle and resilience and mental fortitude and deep vulnerability that has never been given space to come out. It must be heavy being The Rock; everyone thinks it must be pretty great, but I think it must be heavy, too – and quite a lot to uphold that infrastructure.”
One of the most beautiful shots in The Smashing Machine centers around Dawn as she rides solo in a Gravitron ride at a local fair: she’s all unbridled joy, suspended without gravity, free for a precious few minutes. I ask Blunt what she felt shooting that scene. “Nauseous,” she quips. “I’m not great on rides.”
“I don’t LOVE wearing HEELS, so getting back to The Devil Wears Prada has been a RUDE awakening for all of us”
Now the next phase of work begins: this is Blunt’s first interview about her work on The Smashing Machine, and the day after we meet, she’s got a fitting for the Venice Film Festival, where the movie will make its debut. She likes a thematic strategy to red-carpet dressing, like her 1940s-inspired homages to Oppenheimer.
“I quite like it if it is emblematic of the movie, because then that, in turn, feels more fun, more specific – and I love a story,” she says of planning her press tour looks. “[For The Smashing Machine] there has to be a 1990s vibe. We have to do an ode to Dawn, or my version of it.”
In her real life, Blunt prefers to go casual; today, she’s in a matching silk set with a baggy jean jacket layered on top. “I drown myself in clothes,” she explains. “I quite like oversized; I like to hide, I like to shroud.” When she goes out, she’ll dress it up – jewelry, a little makeup – but still grounds it all with a pair of sneakers. “I don’t love wearing heels, so getting back to The Devil Wears Prada has been a rude awakening for all of us,” she says. And, I dare to ask, what has it been like to slip back into Emily Charlton’s stilettos? “Wild,” Blunt says with a playful smile after a moment’s pause. “I’ll say that.”
A lot is different this time around, which, given the 20-year gap between movies, is to be expected. But one major change in filming is the near-constant presence of paparazzi, who are dutifully capturing every look before the movie even wraps. Blunt says she hasn’t experienced it to the extent of her co-stars “Meryl and Annie” (Streep and Hathaway), but they’re all following Hathaway’s “zen approach” to dealing with it all. If anything, it has fully illustrated just what the original movie has meant to so many fans.
“When we MADE the first movie, none of us expected the METEORIC life that it would have and the IMPACT it would have on people”
“When we made the first movie, none of us expected the meteoric life that it would have and the impact it would have on people. As my husband said to me the other day, this is people’s nostalgia bank. They’ve watched this with their families 50, 60 times; they’ve watched it when their parents are sick; they’ve watched it when they’re sad, when they’ve gone through a breakup,” Blunt says, awe evident in her voice. “Of course, I meet people who will quote the movie to me, but I’m not sure I’ve ever been hit with a bombardment of the realization of what the movie is to people coming back to the film set. And that’s what we all feel, holy cow. That’s what everyone says, every day: holy shit.”
“[Stanley Tucci’s] not GOOD for your Devil Wears Prada diet… because he’s cooking PASTA and making me DRINK martinis with him every night”
But as much as The Devil Wears Prada has impacted fans, it quite literally changed Blunt’s life. It made her a household name, but it’s also what brought co-star Stanley Tucci into her life, as he would go on to marry her sister and give Blunt her niece and nephew. “So it has deep emotional roots for a lot of us,” Blunt says simply. “It’s not just doing a movie.”
“He’s not good for your Devil Wears Prada diet though, because he’s cooking pasta and making me drink martinis with him every night,” Blunt adds jokingly of her brother-in-law. “He was like, ‘Em, do you want some pomodoro pasta?’ I’m like, ‘I do, but I have to be in Dior couture today, so we’ll see.’”
It must be a strange thing, to have your personal life be so public in ways you can’t control, for people you’ve never met to feel like they know you. During a big fight scene in The Smashing Machine, Dawn says to Mark, “You don’t know a damn thing about me.” I wonder whether that was something Blunt could relate to, being in the public eye.
“I feel that about everybody – like, I’m here talking to you, but I don’t know what you look like in your sweatpants, when you’re annoyed, or when you have your period,” she replies. “That’s what I love about the job: for this moment, you get to lift the valance on people, and make space for figuring out who people really are. Certainly, people in the public eye, we’ve all been increasingly trained to hold cards closer to our chest. And yet, I do feel in a lot of the people I work with and people I know, there’s this almost deep desire to be known, but there’s a fear of being known because of backlash. So it’s a tricky balance between really wanting people to know you, but being fearful of it, too.”
Speaking of the balance, Emily Charlton now calls: our interview has been scheduled between valuable time off with family and filming The Devil Wears Prada 2, and Blunt needs to get back to it. But if there’s one thing she won’t sacrifice to make it all work, it’s bedtime with her children. “Once my children start to find me repellent, once Mommy doesn’t reign supreme, I will do it, but I feel bedtime is this essential anchor,” she says. “The 10-minute chats where they tell you everything – you don’t want to miss them.”
The Smashing Machine is in movie theaters from October 3