Sounding as if she’s quoting a chapter from the gospel of Ari, the super-agent on HBO’s Entourage, Emily Blunt offers her approach to building an acting career.
“You have to mix it up,” Blunt says. “Do one for them, one for me.”
Though she has two new movies in theaters – the recently released Sunshine Cleaning and The Great Buck Howard – it’s hard to say which is for her and which is for “them,” since both are quirky little movies. They each have their stars: Amy Adams, fresh from her Oscar-nominated performance in Doubt, stars in Sunshine Cleaning, and Buck Howard features John Malkovich as the titular entertainer. But neither movie is the sort of boffo box-office studio project that Ari would endorse.Then again, Blunt has seven films in some stage of pre- to-post-production set to open later this year or next, including The Wolf Man, a hip horror movie co-starring Benicio del Toro scheduled for a prime November spot during the holiday movie season. So the actress riding on the Next-Big-Thing express isn’t worried about keeping a precise order to her me-and-them balance.
“I feel very fortunate, but this whole acting-celebrity thing is just one continual leap of faith. I’m limited to the roles I want and by the roles I’m given,” Blunt says.
Lacey Terrell
‘You have to mix it up.’ Emily Blunt (right) in a scene from Sunshine Cleaning with Amy Adams.
“What I choose is really the only control I have, so if a role I really want comes up but maybe isn’t the right role according to some schedule, I’m not going to pass it up.”
As she’s explaining how to get ahead in movie acting without really going crazy, the British actress speaks with an accent that fans can instantly recognize. It’s the voice of her most famous character to date: the flinty fashionista who vies with Anne Hathaway for Meryl Streep’s approval in The Devil Wears Prada.
That’s not the case in either of her current movies; in both, she speaks with distinctly American accents.
But here’s an interesting detail, and perhaps an insight into why she’s being praised so enthusiastically by critics and filmmakers alike. She speaks in two subtly but distinctly different American accents. This striking attention to detail contrasts with many actors who don’t quite master the other country’s accent – Dick Van Dyke’s cockney in Mary Poppins, for instance.
“Ooooh, no,” Blunt says. “I mean, on the one hand, there’s a certain amount of winging it that goes into speaking with some accent, but I at least try to make myself sound the way my character should sound. So with Sunshine Cleaning, my character lives in Albuquerque. I just listened to how people there talked. It’s all very nuanced, all about vowel sounds.”
This little gesture of craft provides a glimpse of the determination driving Blunt; specifically, in an industry full of celebrities, she is determined to be an actor. This leads her to recall the sage advice given to her by co-star and old-timer Alan Arkin.
“He said it never has to be perfect, it just has to be real. And that makes a lot of sense to me.”
That determination has also directed her choices off camera. Her rising profile in Hollywood brings celebrity attention as well as acting opportunities.
She’s had to recalibrate some of her all-too-natural impulses in conversations because the consequences are magnified when the celebrity-media industry is ready to pounce on the least little thing. Like, say, a few in-interview comments about her romance with singer Michael Bublé and their subsequent break-up.
“It was horrid,” she says. “But I’ve learned my lesson. There are now areas of my life I don’t discuss.”
Yes, there’s a word for that, what’s it called ? Privacy, the oil to celebrity’s water.
“It is a funny balance. You have to be a professional exhibitionist and a private person.
“I’m still figuring it out.”
Source: Dallas News
