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Harper's Bazaar UK July/August 2023

ph TOM SCHIRMACHER

 

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Emily Blunt: a seat at the table

Emily Blunt has earned her place on Hollywood’s A list, with a flourishing career and the power to pick and choose projects that matter to her. The star of this summer’s most-anticipated film, Oppenheimer, talks to Frances Hedges about motherhood, moving behind the camera and the enduring magic of the big screen

BY FRANCES HEDGESPUBLISHED: 07 JUNE 2023
 

Emily Blunt is apologising for being late. it is entirely unnecessary – she’s only five minutes behind schedule for our Zoom call, a mere nothing compared with the usual barrage of time and location changes that are par for the course with celebrity interviews – but politeness is one of her most endearingly English traits, as is her sense of humour. "I was just talking to a friend last night about our love affair with The Great British Bake Off," she says, laughing. "It’s the irreverence of it – you’d never get away with some of the innuendos over here."

‘Over here’ means in Brooklyn, which has been home for Blunt and her family – her husband, the actor and director John Krasinski, and their two daughters Hazel and Violet, aged nine and seven – since 2016. She has been a sworn-in citizen of the United States for eight years now, and for all the complexities that identity brings, she admits to being ‘seduced by America’s great qualities’. "I have to be, right? My husband’s American, my children are American... That’s three of my favourite people in the world." A stint living in LA left her pining for London, but in Brooklyn she found the sense of community she had been missing. "I feel very at home here," she says. "It’s like a village within New York, with all the spontaneity combined with the reality of being in a big city." So many of her close friends live nearby, she adds, that "it’s almost like being on Sesame Street!"

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One such friend is Sienna Miller, whom she was photographed embracing on the red carpet at the Met Gala just a few days before we speak. "She’s one of the people I cling to, living here," says Blunt, who attended the event wearing a Karl Lagerfeld-inspired look custom-made by Michael Kors: sequin-encrusted satin trousers under a matching overskirt and a lace blouse with a black organza bow. "I adore fashion," she says, before adding unexpectedly, "but it’s not really my world. It can be quite an intimidating crowd, and I sometimes feel a bit on the outside of it." The gala’s costuming tradition helps put her at ease. "I love that everyone there is playing a role, so it becomes less self-reflective and more performative."

 
 

Blunt, after all, is a performer by nature. Her varied roles have included a principled FBI agent in Sicario, a no-nonsense Mary Poppins, a resilient mother in A Quiet Place and its sequel, and a courageous noblewoman navigating the lonely landscape of the American West in the recent television miniseries The English. Her most notable upcoming project – Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which tells the story behind the creation of the atomic bomb – will once again see her take on a complex yet fascinating character. She portrays Kitty Oppenheimer, the frustrated wife of Cillian Murphy’s physicist. "She wasn’t an easy woman – she definitely didn’t conform to the 1950s housewife ideal, and yet she found herself confined to an ironing board in Mexico’s Los Alamos, which must have driven her mad," says Blunt, who describes her as having a ‘monumental presence’. "I found her so interesting to play, because she was a great scientist herself, but limited by the era she lived in. A lot of women a few generations ahead of me weren’t allowed the juggle of a career and children – there was an expectation they should choose, and if they did choose their career, they were frowned upon. Even now, I see women in their seventies whose whole identity has been caught up in motherhood, and then once that’s done, there’s this sense of, well, who am I and how do I reclaim myself?"

 
I still feel frozen with fear when I step on set that first day... And then I’m off, and I go through that sense of being possessed by someone

Familiar with the challenges of balancing professional success with parenthood, Blunt threw herself into preparing for the part with her signature fervour. "Getting into character is a very “inner” process for me," she says. "It’s about the little details that funnel down into something." For all her experience, starting a major project such as this remains daunting for her. "I still feel frozen with fear when I step on set that first day... And then I’m off, and I go through that sense of feeling possessed by someone." It helped that she and Murphy had co-starred in A Quiet Place Part II, so their chemistry came naturally ("We have so much trust when we work together that we throw caution to the wind"). Murphy, who calls me from Dublin to talk about his experience of collaborating with Blunt, is profuse in his praise of her ‘fierce intelligence’. "Emily has that, both intellectually and emotionally," he says. "She’s a phenomenal actress, not to mention the kindest, most thoughtful person."

Starring in this film clearly means a lot to Blunt. At one point, she moves her camera to show me a collection of mementos from the set, displayed with pride on her living-room shelves: a history book and a vintage gin bottle with her character’s name on it, both gifts from Christopher Nolan. "I’ve always felt he’s groundbreaking in the way he’s able to create these big themes that are meaningful on the most visually stunning scale," she enthuses. "He has single-handily changed cinema for everybody." Like many in her industry, she felt the absence of the big screen keenly during the pandemic, and Nolan, more than anyone, makes films that are designed to be experienced en masse, in full surround sound.

 

"Of course I’m hugely supportive of streaming, but when it first became part of the ecosystem, I was afraid we were losing the sense of event and ceremony – that thing of going out and putting your phone down and getting immersed in a world with a roomful of strangers," she says. "I’m very nostalgic about [cinema], because I have so many distinct memories of it from my upbringing."

That upbringing was a happy one: raised in south-west London by a barrister father and an actress-turned-teacher mother, Blunt was one of four siblings, who remain close (one of her sisters is staying with her in Brooklyn the week that we speak). She suffered from a stutter as a child, and acting became a way to regain her fluency; she had no firm intention of pursuing it as a career path, yet at 18, following an audition for the late director Peter Hall, she found herself appearing on stage alongside Judi Dench in a West End production of The Royal Family. "I was completely wowed and starstruck by the whole thing," recalls Blunt. "I remember being in Judi’s dressing-room every night and thinking, my God, Pierce Brosnan is here – this is crazy!" She learnt a lot from Dench’s healthy attitude to fame: "There’s nothing tortured about her – she wears her success so lightly." So, too, does Blunt, perhaps because she was never fixated on stardom as a young actress. "I quite liked auditioning, because I didn’t feel my whole life depended on it," she says, adding that she tries not to reflect too much on her current A-list status. "When I see myself up on a billboard, I have this complete dissociation with it... I’m like, who’s that? And I can see my children doing the same – they might say, oh, there’s Mama, but it’s not exciting for them. What’s exciting for them is when I can pick them up from school and take them swimming."

 

Carving out time for her daughters is a priority for Blunt, who has a strict policy of never being absent from them for more than a fortnight. "Because even though they’re hardy, and they’re used to this strange life, it’s still rough on them when I have to go away," she says. Following a run of big projects – as well as Oppenheimer, she has recently wrapped production on David Yates’ Netflix conspiracy drama Pain Hustlers, about a single mother who becomes involved in a criminal scheme run by a failing pharmaceutical firm, and the forthcoming action film The Fall Guy, co-starring Ryan Gosling– she has decided to take the rest of the year off. "There are cornerstones of the girls’ day that I don’t want to compromise on – like, will you wake me up, take me to school, pick me up and put me to bed?" she explains. "And I just want to be able to say, yes, yes, yes. It’s such an exhale for me to be able to do that."

She knows she is fortunate to have the luxury of choosing to take a step back, and that the film world is not always so kind to women. "My toes curl when people tell me, 'My daughter wants to be an actress.' I want to say, don’t do it!" she exclaims. "Because it’s a hard industry and it can be very disappointing. A lot of people tell you not to take things personally – but it’s completely personal, especially when you’re being judged on how you look. So you just have to endure that side of things." Blunt has kept her own head above water by staying off social media and resisting the temptation to read reviews ("I’m blissfully unaware of what people think about me, negative or positive"), as well as by learning from past experiences. "I’ve probably just become more adept at doing the dance," she says. Less cynically, she takes comfort from the fact that conversations about equal pay have now entered the mainstream, giving women the freedom to voice their rights. "Ambition is healthy – it shouldn’t be seen as a negative thing," she says. "It’s about knowing your worth and what you bring to a project, and never apologising for doing well."

 
 

The good news is that women entering the industry today are less likely to be pigeonholed into only one discipline. "You don’t just have to be an actor, you can be other things as well," says Blunt. She herself is increasingly exploring new professional avenues: already as impressive a singer as she is an actress (her husband famously shed tears of joy when he first heard her rehearsing for Into the Woods), she recently garnered her first official producer credit for The English, in which she also starred. "I’ve always adored the genre of the Western – it’s built on brutality, toxic masculinity and revenge, and the loneliness of the environment is terribly cinematic," she says. "This idea was brought to me in its embryonic stage, and I lived with it and partnered with Hugo [Blick, the writer and director] every step of the way." As a result, the miniseries is one of her proudest achievements. "Things become passion projects when you have authorship over what you’re building – The English felt like a baby to me, and that made it all the more frightening when it came out, because I didn’t have any distance from it," she admits. "You have this thing where you want to protect it and love it, but you don’t know what the wolves are going to think." Fortunately, they loved it too, and Blunt was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild award for her performance.

 
 

More producer roles are likely to follow; Blunt has already optioned a short story by the acclaimed Irish writer Claire Keegan, who is represented by her sister Felicity, a literary agent, and is excited about the prospect of bringing it to life on screen. Elsewhere, there is talk of a further collaboration with Krasinski for the third part of the Quiet Place trilogy, which she says she would be "thrilled to do because I have so much respect for John as a director". (Blunt admits that working together on two such harrowing films was draining – "it was all that we talked about, all that we focused on" – but the pair clearly came out stronger from the experience.) Directing remains an ambition, though not one she feels any great urgency to fulfil while her children are still young. At 40, she seems secure in herself and relaxed about her future career trajectory. "I’m sure at some point it’s going to catch up with me, the burn of my forties, but I don’t feel it yet," she says, smiling. "It may be because I’ve stepped into a position of self-generating, so it feels like I’ve got control – I’m not just waiting for the next thing to come along." What still motivates her is the pursuit – or creation – of compelling, true-to-life female characters who consistently break stereotypes. "I get irritated when I’m told, 'She’s a badass' – that’s not interesting to me because that’s not real life," says Blunt with feeling. "What I like is that sense of a fish out of water, someone who’s struggling, who’s haphazardly clawing their way out. Women are heroic when they’re in way over their heads."

As long as there are roles of that kind coming her way, we can rest assured that Blunt will never be far from our screens. "I really don’t want to give up acting; I love it so much," she says. "I have this thing inside me, this burning thing that is only fed by this job – which, yes, I entered into casually, but has become a mad love affair." Long may her passion endure.

‘Oppenheimer’ is in cinemas from 21 July.

 

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