Emily Blunt: ‘You Can Get Away With A Lot With This Accent!’, Movieline Interview

Though she’s played some forbidding characters on-screen (including her breakout role in The Devil Wears Prada), it’s easy to fall for Emily Blunt. For me, affection came instantly over lunch at the Chateau Marmont as Blunt picked up a menu and cried out, “Arugula and bacon-wrapped dates! Have you had them?”

“Yes,” I said. “Bacon-wrapped anything is—”

“Awesome. I know.”

A woman after my own heart. And Blunt’s clever summation of the actor-ridden Chateau—“It’s a bit like a drama school party, isn’t it?”—didn’t hurt either.

Over the course of the next hour, the 26-year-old Blunt charmed while discussing her busy year: the just-released Sunshine Cleaning is already a modest indie success, and she has the Martin Scorsese-produced royal drama The Young Victoria yet to come, as well as a high-profile turn opposite Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins in The Wolf Man. The London-born actress doesn’t mind spending promotional duties on the Left Coast; in fact, says Blunt, “I think particularly British people have a sort of faux snobbery about LA. We all secretly fucking love it, believe me.” Once those bacon-wrapped dates arrived, we began by catching up on the few movies this year that don’t star Blunt—their loss.

What haven’t you seen yet that you want to?
Have you seen The Wrestler? I want to see that really bad. I’m so desperate to see it. Is it good?

It’s my favorite of Darren Aronofsky’s films, actually.
[smiling] Surely not more than The Fountain!

Have you seen Che?
No, I haven’t seen it yet. Benicio [Del Toro] sent me an email saying, “There’s a screening of the long movieeeee. You wanna come see it?” I was like, “I can’t, buddy.” I hear he’s stunning in it, and I have every faith that he is. He’s a rare breed, Benicio. He sees the world in a different light. He’s very brave as an actor, and he doesn’t have a false note in his repertoire. Read More »

Published:
April 16, 2009 – 8:33 am
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By Angelic
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There Will Be Beauty

A fancy-dress ball on the deck of theTitanic? Or a firm bet on the future of civilization? The author argues that amid gloom and disaster the couture collections may be more vital than ever, as Michael Roberts photographs Emily Blunt (The Young Victoria) in some of the season’s most extravagant creation

It’s one of the great metaphysical mysteries of our equal-opportunity, post-feminist, oh-god-is-that-the-time lives—Why do men’s and women’s buttons do up differently? Or, rather, why do women wear their buttons the wrong way round? Well, a long time ago, in a land far away, it was decreed that men’s buttons should do up the easiest way for a right-handed chap on the inside of a shirt, but women’s should do up for the convenience of a right-handed girl on the outside of a shirt. It was assumed that all ladies would forever and always be dressed by their maids. (Who dressed the maid?) And the silent, servile, pursed mouth of a girl’s buttonhole still judges her a fingers-and-thumbs failure for having to do herself up. It is a ghost of couture, a reminder that once all clothes were bespoke, handmade. Read More »

Published:
April 11, 2009 – 3:36 am
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By Angelic
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Emily Blunt is a natural woman

It’s that extraordinary day in London, the recent Monday when snow covers everything and no buses run, when schools are closed and strangers smile at each other in the street, thus acknowledging both the beauty and sudden emptiness of an unexpectedly transformed capital. Emily Blunt needs to be in Los Angeles by tomorrow evening but the news is that all flights out of town have been delayed, if not cancelled.

Resourceful, the actress has booked a 5pm seat on Eurostar and now will seek to make her onward journey via Paris. That means she cannot meet me for tea this afternoon, as had been planned. And that’s why she has invited me to come instead to her apartment this lunchtime. An out-of-the-ordinary day indeed. Actors hardly ever invite journalists into their homes, unless of course they’re being paid to. Why would they?

Not that I feel I’m invading an intensely personal space. Blunt’s first-floor flat, close to the fashionable shopping streets of Notting Hill, is high-ceilinged, open-plan and filled with the kind of large and rather formal pieces of modern furniture you might encounter in a boutique hotel. Tracy Chapman plays softly on an iPod docking station. Blinds are drawn against the pale winter light. And if these calm, clutter-free rooms suggest only occasional occupation by their owner, that’s because hers is a peripatetic life these days, much of it spent filming on location, or in LA. Read More »

Published:
February 21, 2009 – 12:35 am
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By Angelic
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Our Tribute to ‘Blue Velvet’ Starring Emily Blunt

“I adore film noir style,” says actress Emily Blunt, shown here in the role of Dorothy Vallens, the tragic femme fatale in cult auteur David Lynch’s 1986 opus Blue Velvet. The kinkfest classic turned Isabella Rossellini into an icon, while pushing noir convention into the shadows of dangerously surreal Americana. “Blue Velvet is so dark and ethereal,” says Blunt. “It’s brooding yet artistic—I love it.”

Best known for her comedic roles—like a star-making breakthrough performance inThe Devil Wears Prada—Blunt had no problem channeling Rossellini’s smoky, knife-edge carnality. At the same time, the 25-year-old London native put her own wicked spin on the sexy transformation. A week later, she’s still buzzing about the results.

“The shoot was definitely glamorous,” Blunt explains by phone from her family’s home in London. “Becoming that character was incredible: it was more like acting than just doing another photo shoot.” Blunt has been plumbing emotional and psychological depths for some time, beginning with a role that first brought her fame in the U.K., a gripping turn as Tamsin, the sapphic teen antagonist at the core of the 2004 indie hit My Summer of Love.

“There’s a darker side to all of us, and people choose to explore it or not. Taboo love affairs are the most fun, aren’t they? We’ve all casually hurt someone, then looked back and regretted it. Or not, in the case of some people,” says Blunt, who recently split from singer Michael Bublé. “Playing ‘baddies’ is just more fun playing than ‘goodies.’ ”

That she even made it this far still surprises Blunt, who says she got into acting only as a last-ditch therapy for a childhood stutter. “It was an anguished disability—not fun,” she recalls. “But I overcame it.” At age 12, while playing a character from Northern England, with an accent completely different from her own, Blunt found her stutter magically disappear. “In acting, I could be someone else and escape being a child who doesn’t talk,” she recalls. “It became an out-of-body experience.” Read More »

Published:
February 17, 2009 – 9:24 am
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By Angelic
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