The only actors who left Emily Blunt starstruck: “I was completely wowed”
Emily Blunt has worked with some of the biggest names around. Recently, she found herself in the star-studded cast of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, sharing screen time with Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr, Florence Pugh, Rami Malek, and more. She also starred opposite Dwayne Johnson in Jungle Cruise, a partnership she will be reviving for the upcoming Benny Safdie feature, The Smashing Machine, and has proved the value of keeping it in the family, working with her real-life husband, John Krasinski, in A Quiet Place.
It wasn’t always guaranteed that the Englishwoman would become a big star. After overcoming a childhood stammer, she needed a little convincing from Billy Connolly that acting was a worthwhile pursuit. Yet another name to add to her contact list, and it turns out that she was rubbing shoulders with stars from the beginning of her career.
After being discovered by an agent at the Edinburgh Fringe festival, Blunt was given her first professional gig at the age of 18. She was cast in Peter Hall’s 2001 version of The Royal Family at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London’s famous West End. The play, penned by Pulitzer Prize-winning pair George S Kaufman and Edna Ferber in the 1920s, is a dialogue-heavy, winding tale of the Cavendish family. Headed by matriarch Fanny, a former star of the stage, the clan have various discussions and arguments with each other on stage, all at once, in this cross-section of life behind the curtain for theatre’s biggest names.
Blunt was cast as Gwen Cavendish, Fanny’s granddaughter. This put her in the enviable position of acting alongside the great Dame Judi Dench, who was leading the production. “I remember being in Judi’s dressing room every night,” Blunt recalled to Harper’s Bazaar some years later, “thinking, my God, Pierce Brosnan is here—this is crazy… I was completely wowed and starstruck by the whole thing.” While Brosnan wasn’t part of the cast, he would have been friends with Dench through their work on the James Bond series. He was probably just dropping in to wish his onscreen boss good luck.
The young performer was struck by how calm her elder seemed, despite decades of success on both stage and screen. “There’s nothing tortured about her,” Blunt revealed of Dench. “She wears her success so lightly”. This is something that resonated with her onstage family member, who “quite liked auditioning, because I didn’t feel my whole life depended on it”.
The Royal Family got great reviews, and Blunt’s performance caught the attention of even more high-profile people. Her first screen appearance, in a TV movie called Boudica, followed just two years later, followed by her first theatrically released debut with Paweł Pawlikowski’s My Summer of Love in 2004. Though she hasn’t appeared alongside Dame Judi onscreen, they have both played the same character. Dench has portrayed Queen Victoria in a number of films, most notably in Mrs Brown alongside Emily’s old pal, Billy Connolly, while Blunt has portrayed a younger version of the monarch in the appropriately titled The Young Victoria.
Landing your first professional gig alongside a bona-fide legend must have been unfathomably stressful, but Blunt clearly wasn’t going to let that get to her. She used this high-profile position to springboard into an iconic career of her own. Who knows, maybe one day we’ll hear about another great British actor who’ll get their start as a youngster opposite Blunt.
