IN THE early 1840s, the UK’s celebrity magazine was the satirical Punch. And their Lindsay Lohan was a naive but feisty woman named Alexandrina Victoria.
“She was a total party animal; rebellious, vivacious, full of joie de vivre,” says Emily Blunt, chatting enthusiastically about her latest role as Queen Victoria in The Young Victoria. “She never stopped – riding horses all day, dancing until four o’clock in the morning. People today only think of her as the weeping widow, but she had a real zest for life.”
While the Victorian era is known for laced-up social attitudes, for rules and etiquette as uptight as a whale-bone corset, its tabloid columnists could be just as lethal as any Perez Hilton in their attacks on the monarch. “She obviously felt all the country’s eyes were on her, watching her every move and every mistake,” empathises Blunt. “She was ridiculed and put up for people’s amusement. It would have been a horrible experience.”
Blunt is speaking so passionately, it’s hard not to draw comparisons with her own life. After being discovered at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival when she was 18, then starring in My Summer of Love in 2004, Blunt shot to household fame in 2006, playing the bitchy editor’s assistant in The Devil Wears Prada.
Her arched eyebrows and green-eyed death-stare bagged a Golden Globe nomination, with many critics declaring she out-acted her more experienced co-stars, Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway.
Around this time, Blunt hooked up with Canadian jazz singer Michael Buble.
For a while, they enjoyed a gloriously happy union, Blunt saying, “Sometimes I even get tears in my eyes when I see him onstage. It’s overwhelming.”
But when their three-year relationship fell apart in June last year, thanks to the strain caused by the time the couple spent apart due to work commitments, the public interest became an intrusion. (Their situation wasn’t helped by rumours Buble cheated on her.)
Today, the gossip mill is making bread out of the news Blunt is dating John Krasinski, star of the US version of The Office, but after firmly stripping her heart from her sleeve, she’s keeping mum about her new beau, saying, “I learnt to stop talking (about relationships) You just can’t.. And I won’t again.”
Not that she’s lost her romantic streak. Much of The Young Victoria focuses on the fledgling love affair between Victoria and her future consort, Prince Albert (Rupert Friend).
“They were a meeting of souls,” says Blunt, as she gulps tea in the London flat she shares with her literary agent sister, Felicity, 29.
“He was her greatest achievement; without him, she wouldn’t have been able to do half of what she did. He was the gentle conductor in her life and he loved her selflessly. That’s a rare quality in a man who could be emasculated by her position.”
If Blunt’s sudden success had any bearing on her split with the Canadian crooner, the 26-year-old isn’t looking back. In the past three years, she’s become hot property in LA, with parts in films such as Charlie Wilson’s War, with Tom Hanks, and Sunshine Cleaning opposite Amy Adams.
But she remains a typically English actor – posh without being pretentious, beautiful without being brazen and she’s the first to laugh at herself and make a joke of the surreal Hollywood machine.
“You make a choice to accept it because it’s not that bad,” she says. “It’s not something you want to moan about, because people will be like, ‘Oh, just get a real job!’ Anyway, I’m not like poor Brad and Angelina, who can’t buy a coffee in the morning without a circus.
I guess there’s a certain awareness you can’t just step out of the house without thinking about it. Victoria and Albert were lucky they didn’t have the internet, which is the bane of anyone who’s in this industry – everyone is a paparazzo.”
Blunt’s celebrity status hasn’t stopped her feeling awed by her A-list experiences. She says she was utterly star-struck when meeting Sarah Ferguson, former Duchess of York, who was a producer on the movie, along with Martin Scorsese.
“I don’t think I’ll ever get used to meeting famous people, but Sarah makes life easy for anyone who wants to talk to her. She made tea for everyone onset, which was nice.”
As well as Ferguson’s input, the crew had historians onset, while filming at the first Duke of Marlborough’s 18th century pad, Blenheim Palace, gave Blunt a sense of what it might have been like to live in an ivory tower.
“It’s a wonderful thing when you can walk around those corridors, knowing the royals did the same thing. It humanises them, and that’s an important aspect of the film – not that I was lording it like I was the Queen of England!”
Royalty may not be in her blood, but drama certainly is; her mum, Joanna, is a former theatre actor and her dad, Oliver, is a criminal barrister.
“We’re a family of performers, but it’s not like we sit around the dinner table quoting Shakespeare or anything,” she snorts.
As well as Felicity, Blunt has a brother, Sebastian, 20, who’s at university and a younger sister, Susannah, 18, currently sitting her high school exams.
Blunt says she was never “queen bee” as a child, instead describing herself as “really geeky”. What’s this? Another starlet laying claim to her former nerdiness? “I roll my eyes when actors say that about themselves, but I genuinely was,” she insists.
“I was never the girl at school who had a firm enough grip on herself to sweep through life. I think I worry too much and get too upset by things. I was confused, like most teenagers, just wafting around not knowing what the f*ck I wanted to do.”
Blunt’s bookworm status hasn’t left her, and she rummages through her unpacked suitcase (“I like crumpled clothes. I’ve never been big on an iron”) to find the mini-library she’s toting around the set of her current project, Gulliver’s Travels. She pulls out Norwegian Wood by Murakami Haruki and The Corrections by Jonathon Franzen, but she’s no academic show-off. “It’s amazing what you can crack through on those long plane trips.
Reading is a real escape. I think a good book can change your life.”
Luckily, not all those flights are for work. She talks about a recent holiday to Italy, where she hiked in the hills and discovered abandoned cathedrals, rewarding her exertion by gorging on the local food. “I ate so much, I had to roll out of the country.”
It’s just as well she works out then, bearing in mind she doesn’t have much time to get in shape before filming starts for her next role – as a ballerina in The Adjustment Bureau, alongside Matt Damon. “I saw my trainer yesterday, so I’m feeling worse for wear today,” she says dramatically. “I’m going to dance boot camp.
I’ll never be at the same standard as a professional, but hopefully I’ll be able to do a little bit. I didn’t do ballet when I was a child; I gave it up when I was three – in some sort of bratty rage, claiming it hurt my feet.”
As well as an aversion to tutus, Blunt had a stammer when she was a kid and found that acting, and adopting different accents, helped her overcome nerves.
These days, she laughs, the stammer has downgraded itself to a mere twitch. “If I have to get up and speak, like when I presented an award at the BAFTAs, the side of my lip goes crazy. I have to put on a big toothy smile to hide it.”
A convulsing face wasn’t her only problem at the event. “Next time, I’m going to take my glasses, because I’m practically blind; I couldn’t read the lines. I really did panic, and thought it was going to be awful.”
Whether she likes it or not, all eyes are on Blunt as she ascends to the top of an exclusive list of actors to play a British queen. “I feel lucky I managed to play someone who was not only powerful and influential, but also a woman.
There’s a dearth of films with strong women as leads,” she exclaims seriously.
But I suspect that, much like her character, Blunt has the spunk to reign in Hollywood long into the future. “I have a real curiosity about life,” she says proudly. “And I refuse to live it in a limited way.”
The Young Victoria is in cinemas August 27.
Source: News Australia
