Emily Blunt names the “hammiest performance” she’s ever given
Actors can go their whole careers without playing a character that fits into a certain archetype – perhaps it’s just not meant for them or maybe the offer just never comes their way.
Sometimes, though, it’ll come after years of doing completely different roles, and you’re suddenly left wearing the shoes of the kind of character you never thought you’d get to embody.
This was the case for Emily Blunt, who was cast as a villain for the first time in Cedric Nicolas-Troyan’s The Huntsman: Winter’s War in 2016, which was uncharted territory for the established British star. While she’s no stranger to fantasy movies, having appeared in the musical Into the Woods alongside her The Devil Wears Prada co-star Meryl Streep a few years earlier – she even had a role as a princess in the Jack Black fantasy film Gulliver’s Travels – never before had she taken on a part that was so evil.
When Blunt started her career, it was hard to imagine her becoming the star of various big-budget fantasy films, considering that she marked her debut performance with a role in the gritty British coming-of-age drama My Summer of Love. You could argue that her role in the film was actually pretty villainous, as far as teenage girls go, but The Huntsman: Winter’s War was the first time she got to play an outright evil queen, which she decided to give her all with a rather “hammy” performance, as she puts it.
Following on from Snow White & the Huntsman, the film didn’t exactly receive widespread praise, and its box office receipts weren’t glowing, either. Despite the failure of the film to become a memorable part of Blunt’s filmography (she’d soon follow it with the much more popular A Quiet Place), she still enjoyed the experience of playing a completely different role to those she was used to.
“I play a villainous snow queen,” she recalled to IndieWire. “I’ve never played a villain before, and so Charlize [Theron] and I had like a crown-off every day. It was like the hammiest, hammiest performance. But it was really wonderful.”
She continued, “Jessica Chastain’s in it, who’s another powerhouse, and Chris Hemsworth, we kind of let him be one of the girls when we felt charitable. He just got the piss ripped out of him the entire time, poor Chris. I don’t think he’ll ever work with women again.”
Blunt’s role as Princess Freya, who becomes the Snow Queen and keeps an army of kidnapped children to prevent them from finding love – she’s been pretty hard done by in matters of romance – was undoubtedly lots of fun to channel. How often do actors get to play the kinds of roles they surely dreamed about as a child?
Well, you’re probably more likely to dream of being a good princess (unless you’re John Waters, who longed to be the Wicked Witch of the West), but getting to play a hammy, dramatic villain surely unlocked an equal amount of childhood delight.
