Emily Blunt has three specific words that serve as a bit of a red flag when it comes to choosing her next project, saying if she sees them in the script, she’s 'out'.
Blunt, 39, is known for her roles in the likes of The Devil Wears Prada, The Girl on the Train, The Young Victoria, Edge of Tomorrow and – more recently – The English, an epic western series that debuted on the BBC last week that sees her star as in which she plays an aristocratic English woman called Lady Cornelia Locke.
She has revealed how, when considering new projects, she knows what she wants from the characters she takes on.
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In a recent interview with The Telegraph, Blunt said: “I love a character with a secret. And I loved Cornelia’s buoyancy, her hopefulness, her guilelessness.”
She continued: “It’s the worst thing ever when you open a script and read the words ‘strong female lead’. That makes me roll my eyes – I’m already out. I’m bored.”
Blunt believes such ‘strong female leads’ are expected to have almost emotion, adding: “Those roles are written as incredibly stoic, you spend the whole time acting tough and saying tough things.”
With The English, Blunt decided to go for the role of Lady Cornelia Locke after seeing she was a character who had much more complex emotions.
“Cornelia is more surprising than that,” Blunt explained.
“She’s innocent without being naive and that makes her a force to be reckoned with. She startles Eli out of his silence and their differences become irrelevant because they need each other to survive.
“I thought that was very cool.”
Written and directed by multi-award-winning Hugo Blick (The Honourable Woman, Black Earth Rising, The Shadow Line), The English takes on ‘core themes of identity and revenge’ to tell a ‘uniquely compelling parable on race, love and power’
It follows Lady Cornelia Locke and a Pawnee ex-cavalry scout, Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), as they joined forces in 1890 mid-America to cross a ‘violent landscape built on dreams and blood’.
“Both of them have a clear sense of their destiny but neither is aware that it is rooted in a shared past,” a press release for the programme says.
“They must face increasingly terrifying obstacles that will test them to their cores, physically and psychologically.
“But as each obstacle is overcome it draws them closer to their ultimate destination, the new town of Hoxem, Wyoming.
“It is here, after an investigation by the local sheriff Robert Marshall (Stephen Rea) and young widow Martha Myers (Valerie Pachner) into a series of bizarre and macabre unsolved murders, that the full extent of their intertwined history will be truly understood, and they will come face to face with the future they must live.”
Topics: Celebrity, TV And Film
Jess Hardiman