The one movie Emily Blunt never wants to watch again: “Just the brutality of it”
For many moviegoers, Emily Blunt will always be Emily Charlton, the fashion assistant so ruthlessly dedicated to her career that she is willing to run into the middle of traffic and get hit by a car in the name of efficiency. The character was probably meant to be the chief antagonist of Anne Hathaway’s Andy, but Blunt couldn’t help but win the audience over. She’s one of those stars who just emanates charisma. Like Julia Roberts or Brad Pitt, you can’t help but be mesmerised and charmed, no matter the role.
For many moviegoers, Emily Blunt will always be Emily Charlton, the fashion assistant so ruthlessly dedicated to her career that she is willing to run into the middle of traffic and get hit by a car in the name of efficiency. The character was probably meant to be the chief antagonist of Anne Hathaway’s Andy, but Blunt couldn’t help but win the audience over. She’s one of those stars who just emanates charisma. Like Julia Roberts or Brad Pitt, you can’t help but be mesmerised and charmed, no matter the role.
Throughout most of her career, Blunt has taken on romantic comedies, dramas, and period pieces. All that is great – as we’ve established, she’s absurdly charming – but whenever she’s stepped into more action-oriented movies, it’s clear that she is on par with Charlize Theron. Better yet, she always manages to throw in some humour while she’s at it. Edge of Tomorrow, Wild Target, and The Fall Guy are probably the best examples of this.
She can also, it should be noted, steal scenes in extremely serious dramas and action movies. Sicario and Oppenheimer are hardly a barrel of laughs, and yet she still manages to shine. This brings us to the extremely aggravating fact that Blunt has yet to win a single Oscar and has only been nominated for one (‘Best Supporting Actress’ for Oppenheimer). This is uncalled for. She should at least be in the position of someone like Amy Adams – nominated countless times but not yet a winner.
If ever there was a performance for which she deserved an Oscar, it was the almost completely silent one she gave in John Krasinski’s 2018 horror movie A Quiet Place. It’s hard to make a good horror movie. Audiences know every beat, jump-scare, and tired cliché at this point, which causes many filmmakers to simply double down on gore to stand out. A Quiet Place managed to do something extremely rare in this day and age: find a new angle.
The film stars Krasinski and Blunt as a couple with three children trying to navigate a post-apocalyptic world in which most of the population has been killed by blind extraterrestrial monsters with a heightened sense of hearing. Most of the film takes place in silence, giving Blunt and her co-stars the opportunity to turn in the performances of their careers. In one scene, Blunt’s character steps on a nail while barefoot, and her reaction is, on its own, deserving of an Oscar.
Despite her virtuosic performance in the movie, Blunt has said that she is not a horror fan. In fact, she was so traumatised by one film in her youth that it put her off the genre entirely. “I’m such a scaredy cat anyway, but all my friends were seeing Scream, so I thought I’d have to go and see it,” she said in a 2018 interview with Yahoo. It didn’t go down well. In fact, it made her swear off horror movies forever. When asked what aspect of Wes Craven’s classic slasher satire was so scarring, she responded, “Just the brutality of it, someone with a massive great knife just coming and stalking me in my house.”
Many cinemagoers would probably feel that Scream’s fear factor pales in comparison to the level of stress in A Quiet Place, but it’s probably easier to stomach your own movies when you’ve seen behind the curtain.
