The scene that kept Emily Blunt awake for four days: “I’d never thought about it in that way before”
As an audience member, it’s sometimes easy to think actors are so adept at playing pretend, even in an incredibly intense scene, that as soon as a director yells “cut!” they can stroll back to their trailer like nothing happened. According to Emily Blunt, though, this isn’t always the case.
In the Oppenheimer star’s experience, sometimes you can shoot a scene that sticks with you long after the cameras stop rolling. Worse, usually these are the kinds of sequences that no one would want rattling around inside their noggin for days, because they make us confront all sorts of dark thoughts that don’t normally rise to the surface.
Blunt’s most harrowing experience with this kind of scene came when she was shooting Denis Villeneuve’s nail-biting drug cartel thriller Sicario. In one of the film’s most hard-to-watch sequences, her FBI agent Kate Macer takes Jon Bernthal’s police officer Ted home from a bar for a roll in the hay, but soon discovers that he is actually working with the cartel she’s trying to bring down.
The scene then switches on a dime to become a desperate battle for survival as Ted and Macer grapple for control of her gun, before he overpowers her. By the end, he is barely an inch away from strangling her to death when Benicio Del Toro’s mysterious Alejandro rescues her.
When it came time to shoot the scene, Villeneuve, Blunt, and Bernthal all agreed that it should involve no Hollywood bullshit. Blunt’s character wouldn’t suddenly become an expert fighter capable of kicking the ass of a brutish man twice her size, and the fight itself wouldn’t be choreographed to look cool or impressive. Instead, it needed to look like an intense, dirty scrap that ended in the depressingly inevitable conclusion of the stronger party, Bernthal, having his hands around Blunt’s throat.
Before Villeneuve called “action!”, Blunt revealed that Bernthal, a former boxer, told her, “Just smack me. I’m fine. I’m not even gonna feel it.”
This lent the scene an extra layer of reality, and she admitted to GQ, “We kicked the shit out of each other.”
By the end of the day’s shooting, Villeneuve knew they’d captured the raw, harrowing feeling they wanted from the fight, but unfortunately for Blunt, leaving it at the door when she went home for the evening was easier said than done.
“It had quite a lasting effect on me, and I’m not someone who takes my work home with me,” she opened up to The Guardian, “But I couldn’t sleep after that scene, because it was the embodiment of what would happen naturally: someone of my size would inevitably be overpowered by a person Jon’s size.”
In the end, even though she knew she was filming a movie and the fight wasn’t real, per se, they’d done everything they could to make it feel real, so when Bernthal’s fingers closed around her throat, his face contorting into something a person would see right before they shuffle off this mortal coil, there was little acting required.
“When you physically put yourself in that position and you shoot it all day, it has a jarring effect,” she recalled with a shudder, “I felt like my skin was on fire.”
Blunt wound up struggling to sleep for four nights after the scene, which she assumed was simply residual emotions from shooting the scene in a knowingly close-to-the-bone manner, but when she was asked if the sequence made her think about her own mortality, “For sure,” she nodded, slowly comprehending the existential place her mind had gone to, “I’d never thought about it in that way before.”
