When sexism almost cost Emily Blunt her greatest role: “Welcome to Hollywood”
In 2014, it was announced that Emily Blunt would star in a crime thriller exploring the terrifying world of Mexican cartels. She was cast in the lead role of an FBI agent who is led on an eye-opening odyssey into the dark heart of the war on drugs, and she saw her part in the film as an essential step in showing audiences that more women could and should lead movies like it. Naturally, though, as this is not an ideal world, she almost lost out on the role because of Hollywood’s profoundly ingrained sexism.
In truth, 2014 was a pivotal year in Blunt’s career for more than one reason. This was the year that saw the release of Edge of Tomorrow, a wry time loop action-adventure in which she starred alongside Tom Cruise. In this film, though, she is the unflappable badass and Cruise is the ingenue who must be taught how to reach his full potential instead of the other way around. It proved to Hollywood that she had leading lady action chops, but in addition to that, she felt shooting the movie helped her finally understand her own power.
“I was in every script meeting, and I was asked my opinion on women and how they might react,” Blunt told the Los Angeles Times. “I realised it was important to have a voice and not feel shy about having an opinion. I’m at a point in my career where I can actually say, ‘I’ve been doing this a long time.'” She added, “Most of the time, I have more experience than the director I’m working with when it comes to being on a film set.”
Blunt felt like she had come of age as a woman in Hollywood, so imagine her disappointment when she heard that the same age-old Hollywood misconceptions about women in predominantly male-driven movies reared their heads regarding the role of Agent Kate Mercer in Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario.
When screenwriter Taylor Sheridan was shopping his hard-hitting thriller around Hollywood, he encountered an interested party who wanted to back the movie – but only on one condition. “The writer was approached by one financier who said, ‘If you make her a dude, we’ll up your budget,'” Blunt sighed to The Independent. She then rolled her eyes and added, “Welcome to Hollywood.”
“There was some initial pressure there for the rather gross fact that you could up the budget by another third if you make it a guy,” Blunt elaborated to the LA Times. “That’s so gross. You completely alter the dynamic of the piece. The interesting fact for the audience is that she is a woman. There’s something unusual about that.”
Thankfully, Sheridan wasn’t the sort of guy to be swayed into altering Mercer’s character. The writer – who would go on to write Hell or High Water and build a TV empire with Yellowstone – claimed that the financier dismissively said, “Pretty good script. What do you think of making Kate a man, and what do you think of so-and-so playing it?” Incensed by his suggestion, which, as Blunt noted, would have made it a different movie entirely, Sheridan replied, “Go fuck yourself,” and walked out of the office.
Ultimately, Sheridan stood his ground, and Blunt played the character just like he wrote her. He was enormously complimentary of her performance, telling Awards Daily, “I knew from day one it was going to take a beast of an actress to pull it off, and she did.” The screenwriter, who crafted Mercer to be a nuanced audience surrogate, not a stereotypical “strong female lead” – which would have put Blunt off – added, “Emily did it with incredible grace, and I’m just awed by what she accomplished.”
