Emily Blunt names her favourite co-stars: “There’s sort of a secret language”
It didn’t take long for Emily Blunt to become a Hollywood sensation, earning significant roles early on in her career. After leading the television film Boudica, she appeared in My Summer of Love, a Bafta-winning movie that garnered her instant acclaim for her cunning performance as Tamsin. Just two years later, she could be seen in one of her most popular movies, The Devil Wears Prada.
Playing the senior assistant Emily, the actor’s role demonstrated her ability to balance comedy and drama, exposing her to a mainstream audience. Over the next few years, she bagged roles in movies like The Jane Austen Book Club and Young Victoria, although it wasn’t until the early 2010s that her career really began to bloom. With roles in movies like Looper, Edge of Tomorrow, Into the Woods, and Sicario, Blunt firmly found her place in the industry, typically opting for American productions despite her English background.
Her Hollywood status rose even further after she landed one of the main roles in A Quiet Place before playing the titular character in Mary Poppins Returns. With further roles in movies like Jungle Cruise alongside Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, A Quiet Place Part II, The Fall Guy, and the Oscar-winning Oppenheimer, Blunt has established herself as one of the most well-known actors working today.
Naturally, her time working in Hollywood has allowed her to star alongside many popular actors, some of whom she holds dearly as her favourites to act with. Talking to Film Ink, Blunt revealed that Johnson is “absolutely one of my favourites.”
She continued, “He’s just heaven, and we’re best buds. I love him so much, and we had the best time on Jungle Cruise. We knew we wanted to do something else together. I just don’t think either of us knew it would be such a departure, like The Smashing Machine.”
The latter film will be released in 2025, with the pair playing husband and wife under the direction of Benny Safdie. “Because you have trust with someone, it just allows the scenes to take flight, and there’s a sort of secret language,” she explained, adding, “I definitely felt that with Dwayne because it was just so easy, even though the scenes [in The Smashing Machine] were incredibly hardcore and intense and very difficult to get over some of them.”
She also claimed that she feels this with Matt Damon, too, whom she most recently starred alongside in Oppenheimer in 2023. However, the pair actually met over a decade earlier when they starred in The Adjustment Bureau together, in which Damon’s character falls for Blunt’s, a ballerina whom he keeps meeting before some unknown force pulls them apart.
The actor has starred in a wide range of genres, from romantic dramas to family friendly comedies and sci-fi thrillers. It appears that if Blunt is surrounded by actors she gets on well with, she can use that connection to her advantage, creating more chemistry between her and her co-star to make their performances feel even more authentic. If she finds that sense of “trust” with someone, she can give her all to a role, resulting in her various critically acclaimed performances.
