Emily Blunt reveals the secret to Christopher Nolan’s cinematic satisfaction
Emily Blunt has worked alongside some of the greatest directors to ever grace a film set. Rian Johnson cast her in his 2012 sci-fi flick Looper, she played an FBI Special Agent for Denis Villeneuve in Sicario, and her debut feature, My Summer of Love, was directed by Paweł Pawlikowski. However, the filmmaker who delivered her first-ever Oscar nomination was the legendary Christopher Nolan.
The two Brits worked together on Oppenheimer, Nolan’s biopic of the father of the atomic bomb. Blunt played Kitty, the brilliant physicist’s dour and troubled wife, who has to suffer through her husband’s gruelling work and his affair with Florence Pugh’s Jean Tatlock. This performance put her up for Best Supporting Actress at the 2024 ceremony, and although she lost out to Da’Vine Joy Randolph for The Holdovers, this was still a major step forward in her already glittering career.
In conversation with Variety, the actor revealed how she could tell when her director was satisfied with his work. “I can tell when he is very happy with a take because his hair starts to dance,” she revealed. “It’s almost like he vibrates when he’s happy. He’s not going to tell you that he’s that happy, though, because he’s very English.”
This was about something Anne Hathaway, who was also in the interview, said about her time working on Nolan’s Interstellar. “Matthew McConaughey noted that when we were up in the glacier,” she said, in reference to the filming that took place in Iceland to simulate a frozen planet. “The colder it was and the harder the conditions were, the bluer Chris’ eyes became. And the blonder his hair.”
“The part that blows my mind about Chris is that he is authoritative in the best sense of the word,” Hathaway continued. “I remember one day we were doing a shot on The Dark Knight Rises. He came to me beforehand and said, ‘I just want you to know, this shot has lived in my head for many years. I’m going to be very specific about it. I’m going to make you do it a lot, but it’s not actually you. It’s just because I have it in my head a certain way.’” Blunt was equally as complimentary towards the two actors’ mutual boss. “We’ve all been on those sets where the director is a bad dad. You know what I mean? A bad dad who has an ego and an agenda. Chris is a good one.”
Blunt’s performance as Kitty, which also earned her nominations at the Baftas, SAGs, and Golden Globes, was influenced by her subject’s highly unconventional life. “She was on her fourth husband by the time she was 29,” said Blunt of Kitty, who was a scientist in her own right and a member of the Communist Party of America. Blunt said that she found the character’s ferocity “exciting” and that she “understood the anger and resentment” of her having to restrain her own ambitions whilst in her marriage to Oppenheimer.
Whether or not Blunt will join Nolan’s stable of regular contributors remains to be seen. She hasn’t been named in the cast for his upcoming as-yet-untitled movie, due for release in 2026, but the amount of buzz their last collaboration received certainly leaves the door open for further cooperation between the two.
