Emily Blunt’s lifelong obsession with ‘Jaws’: “It’s still my favourite”
In 2015, Emily Blunt was promoting Into the Woods with co-star Meryl Streep when she was asked to name her first big-screen crush during a W magazine video interview. Her answer was so shocking to Streep that she looked at the Sicario star like she had two heads. A bashful Blunt didn’t back down, though, and insisted she’d always had a thing for Roy Scheider in Jaws.
“I have such a crush on him in that movie,” Blunt gushed, while Streep looked like she was trying to figure out if the young actor was suffering from temporary insanity. “It’s the way that cigarette dangles out of the side of his mouth. I’m just saying, no one smokes a cigarette like him.”
Streep’s incredulity made the moment deeply funny, but if she had known about Blunt’s lifelong obsession with Steven Spielberg’s seminal blockbuster, she may have more fully understood the star’s deep, abiding connection to Scheider and his smoking prowess. After all, Blunt first saw Jaws when she was a small child, and reckons she has since watched it more than 35 times throughout her life.
“My dad was always going to the video store to get really inappropriate films for all of us to watch,” a smiling Blunt explained to the Sunday Mirror in 2024. “One of my first experiences was watching Jaws at the age of seven, and he would pitch that it was for the whole family. But it was really for him, and we would be terrified.”
For Blunt, Jaws is one of those films that never gets old, no matter how many times she watches it. In fact, it arguably gets even better with each viewing, and with each behind-the-scenes fact she hears about the troubled production. “The more you see it, the more you learn about how extraordinary it is,” she explained. “It was one of my first memories of films, and it’s still my favourite, even now.”
When Blunt watches Jaws, she loves the suspense Spielberg creates and gets excited like everyone else in the third act when Brody, Hooper, and Quint battle the man-eating Great White that has been terrorising their sleepy seaside town. However, she is adamant that the movie only works as well as it does because, beneath its thrilling trappings, “it’s a film about people and relationships.”
Indeed, to Blunt, he performances from Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw are what truly make the movie sing, not the shark action or John Williams’ iconic minimalist score, although those things are obviously integral, too. “It has amazing characters, and it has this very commercial, suspenseful backdrop, so I do think it’s a perfect movie,” she nodded.
Interestingly, a strange fascination with the craggy, bespectacled face of Scheider isn’t the only lasting impact Jaws had on Blunt’s life. Like a lot of people who watched the movie when they were young, it fostered a debilitating fear of the ocean, and for years, she was too scared to go in the water. In fact, it took until the 2010s for her to come to terms with the fact that Jaws inadvertently created a false perception of sharks, who generally aren’t vicious beasts who will tear human beings to shreds as soon as they dip a toe in the water.
“I just started diving and I really love it,” Blunt revealed in 2012. “That’s helped me become friends with the sharks again, because I went diving with the Grey Reef sharks and Blacktip sharks, and that was extraordinary. I realised they’re not actually out to just tear my guts out; they’re just wanting to be left alone.”
In the end, though, Blunt’s lifelong affinity with Jaws has been a source of much more joy than fear, and her affection for the film shows no sign of dying off anytime soon. In 2025, she appeared as one of several celebrity talking heads in the National Geographic documentary Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story – no doubt telling the world yet again about how much she loves that unusually handsome, chain-smoking police chief.
