Emily Blunt’s bizarre first audition for a movie: “Completely terrifying to me”
Before Emily Blunt became besties with ‘The Rock’, appeared in Oscar-winning movies, and even a hit horror franchise, the actor was just trying to get her start in the industry like everyone else, finding herself in a string of TV projects before eventually bagging an audition for a feature film.
She was nervous, only being 19 years old and having never starred in a big film before. It’s understandable to be anxious, especially because auditions are an inherently terrifying thing – like a job interview with extra, embarrassing steps – but if you want to be an actor, you have to suck it up and perform, and so, Blunt entered the audition for her first movie, unsure of what she was getting herself into, and it turned out to be just as strange as she had expected.
My Summer of Love, directed by Paweł Pawlikowski, saw Blunt play an affluent and manipulative teenager named Tamsin alongside Natalie Press as a working-class girl with whom she forms a chaotic friendship – set during a hot Yorkshire summer, the film was a breakthrough for Blunt, whose performance is cunning and compelling, but to get the role, she had to embark on an audition that left her convinced she was going nowhere.
Pawlikowski wanted to challenge the young actor and see if she had what it took to do something bold and unpredictable. The actor explained to Elle, “He’s filming me on his camcorder. And in his Polish accent, he goes, ‘OK, so we’re going to do a little reading. You look out the window, and you see your dad, and he’s fucking his secretary, and I want you to be horrified. You get very, very mad. Then get very upset and cry about it. And then at some point, pretend the whole thing’s a joke. OK, go.’”
Blunt was suddenly thrust into this unfamiliar world of unconventional auditioning. “He gave me no opportunity but to put my feet to the fire,” she explained, revealing just how convinced she was that she’d blown it. She had no time to prepare for this wacky director, but clearly, he could recognise the actor’s potential.
“Paweł taught me a lot about ambiguity and spontaneity, which was completely terrifying to me at first. To work without any conformity was super scary. But I learned swiftly afterward from watching the movie how compelling ambiguity can be,” she explained.
My Summer of Love won the Bafta for ‘Outstanding British Film’, although Pawlikowski soon came to find greater success with Polish films like 2013’s Ida and 2018’s Cold War. The pair have never worked together since, with Blunt going on to much more mainstream projects, from The Devil Wears Prada to Sicario and Oppenheimer, but she treasures this experience she had of working with the filmmaker at the beginning of her career.
She might be a Hollywood star now, but she’ll never forget her strange audition for Pawlikowski, whose unusual techniques yielded the perfect results.
“I’d say that movie was a big turning point, a big lesson for me. Like being chucked in the deep end with a weight around my ankles,” Blunt concluded.
