The scene Emily Blunt was convinced would kill her: “This is how I die”
Undoubtedly now one of Britain’s most successful actors of all time, Emily Blunt has got herself to a position where she can pretty much pick and choose the best scripts around to do, the way that the likes of Pitt and Clooney can, and the result is that she consistently appears in fantastic films, the latest of which is Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine.
That A24 movie went down well with critics who have it in the mix for Oscars come next March, although some elements of filming it disagreed with Blunt considerably, as we’ll come to. But it’s worth having a look at how Blunt managed to journey from a Surrey boarding school to a bona fide Hollywood A-lister, by way of lesbian dramas and Tom Cruise blockbusters.
Starting off at just 18, acting in the West End, she quickly progressed to small roles in TV and then a first feature film in My Summer of Love in 2004, a British film about two very different women falling for each other that earned her considerable acclaim and a major award for Best Newcomer.
Just two years later, she was in Hollywood and starring in her first major hit alongside Meryl Streep, The Devil Wears Prada, in which Blunt was praised for scene-stealing even up against movie royalty like Streep. The same year, she picked up a Golden Globe award for another film, Gideon’s Daughter, and that led to her being cast opposite Tom Hanks in 2007’s Aaron Sorkin-written drama Charlie Wilson’s War.
After another Golden Globe nomination for playing a young Queen Victoria, she started to get bigger and bigger films, including the brilliant Edge of Tomorrow from 2014 with Tom Cruise and another time-travelling twister, Looper with Bruce Willis.
She then had a fine showing in Denis Villeneuve’s nail-biter Sicario before she showed she could lead a film with genuine quality in her future husband John Krasinski’s clever horror A Quiet Place and then with Disney’s Mary Poppins Returns for which she again was Golden Globe nominated.
Her first film with Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson was another Disney effort, this time the not-very-well-received Jungle Cruise, but she recovered in style to take her place in the ensemble cast of Christopher Nolan’s epic nuclear drama Oppenheimer, earning her first Oscar nomination for her part as Cillian Murphy’s long-suffering wife.
Now for her second movie with Dwayne Johnson, The Smashing Machine, the tale of MMA fighter and wrestler Mark Kerr, that Blunt says she watched back with Safdie and sobbed all the way through. She plays Kerr’s girlfriend and went through the mill for the role, especially because Safdie made her do things she hates, like go on fun park attractions.
She told Variety: “I would rather drink bleach than (go on) ride fairground rides. But Benny (Safdie) has this way of seducing you into saying yes. I ended up on the Gravitron, upside down, wearing this enormous wig, thinking, ‘This is how I die.’”
Thankfully, she did not in fact die, a development which leaves her available to do upcoming movies like an upcoming, but as yet untitled, new sci–fi movie from none other than Steven Spielberg, and also the sequel to The Devil Wears Prada, in which she will reprise her role as Streep’s secretary some twenty years after the original.
