From The Devil Wears Prada to Into the Woods, the five-time Golden Globe nominee shares behind-the-scenes secrets from eight of her most beloved film roles with BuzzFeed News.
My Summer of Love (2004)
Focus Features
Emily Blunt made her film debut in director Pawel Pawlikowski's powerful tale, co-starring Natalie Press, about two young women who find love and acceptance in one another's arms.
"That was not only my first film, but the process was so different than anything I'd experienced before, which was theater or television, where you're given your script and you show up and you hit your mark and you say your lines," Blunt told BuzzFeed News about the entirely improvised film.
"This was a great deal of responsibility on our shoulders to find these characters and find the scene. It was demanding and exhilarating, and I learned more on that film and from Pawel Pawlikowski about acting than I've learned from anybody else. He taught me so much about ambiguity and nuance and the power of suggestion and being courageous and having responsibility as an actor for creating your character. Just to sum it up in two words: It was terrifying and thrilling."
The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Fox 2000
Blunt received worldwide recognition and acclaim following her biting turn alongside Meryl Streep in the immensely popular adaptation of Lauren Weisberger's 2003 novel of the same name, in which she played Emily Charlton, the brusque assistant to Streep's terrorizing magazine editor Miranda Priestly.
"One of the producers on set kept saying, 'This is going to be big," but I had no idea it would hit in the way that it did," Blunt said. "And that men would be dragged along by their wives, unwillingly, and then love it and go see it again and tell their friends. It was a movie that everybody loved and everybody saw, and so when that happens, your life — if you've previously been unknown — is going to change. And my life turned on a dime. I remember I used to go to this bakery in L.A. every day, and one day I went in and everything had changed because the movie came out."
And Devil viewers have a certain soft spot for Emily. "That character still gets quoted to me every single week," she said with appreciation. "Every week. 'Cube of cheese.' I know my demographic, it's very clear to me. I see them coming and I go, 'I'm going to get recognized.'"
After the film's release — and Blunt's Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture — offers flooded in, but the bulk of them revealed how narrow-minded Hollywood can be when it comes to emerging talent.
"I got offered every bitch on the planet," she said, with a laugh. "I really was trying to turn down every acerbic British person that I got offered after that movie came out. I just had to be careful. What I tried to do, really, was stand by the choices that I had made beforehand. I wanted to do different work, I want to do character work, I don't want to be an ingenue, I don't just want to do one thing."
