"People still quote [The Devil Wears Prada] to me every day; or misquote it." Photo / Getty Images
The actress discusses working with The Rock, ageing and her Devil Wears Prada weight loss.
Emily Blunt’s near quarter-century on screen has encompassed everything from blockbusters to a Best Picture Oscar-winner. But the film that has hung over her entire career, she says, was one she made before she had much of a career at all.
Blunt, now 42 years old, shot The Devil Wears Prada when she was just 22: a callow hopeful with one successful British independent film and a handful of TV and theatre credits to her name. “People still quote it to me every day; or misquote it,” she says. “They’ll say something about a cube of cheese and I’ll know exactly what they mean.”
Blunt is talking during a break from filming The Devil Wears Prada 2, which is due for release next year. In a burgundy halter top and stern geometric earrings, she is back in the skin of Emily Charlton: waspish, occasionally cheese-nibbling PA to Miranda Priestly, Meryl Streep’s Anna Wintourian fashion magazine editor.
Even she is astonished by the astronomical levels of hype the sequel has already generated; not just among her fellow millennials, hungry to revisit the cut-throat mid-Noughties New York media scene, but also from a legion of more recent Gen-Z fans for whom the period now looks like some halcyon age.
Does she miss anything about those times? “I miss the irreverence, the swing, the attitude, the confidence.” She pauses. “The world has become very earnest since then; everything’s so tip-toed.” By contrast, in The Devil Wears Prada, “the characters can be so cutting”, she says, “but the meanness was delicious – so much fun to do and, I think, fun to watch. It can be such a relief now to laugh at something inappropriate.”
Her latest film, which centres on a character almost as daunting as Priestly, has her returning to the same era. She stars alongside Dwayne Johnson in The Smashing Machine, a deceptively tender biopic of the Herculean mixed martial artist Mark Kerr, who rose to fame in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
It is Blunt’s first collaboration with director Benny Safdie, one of the two brothers behind the manic comic thrillers Good Time (2017) and Uncut Gems (2019), but her second with Johnson, opposite whom she starred in the 2021 Disney swashbuckler Jungle Cruise.
On its premiere at Venice, The Smashing Machine received rave reviews for Blunt’s performance as Dawn Staples, former Playboy model and Kerr’s wildcat girlfriend. But critics were also taken with Johnson, suggesting the former wrestler – who had a career in the ring as “The Rock” before going on to star in the Jumanji and Fast & Furious franchises – has an uncharacteristically busy awards season ahead of him.
Blunt, who sweetly refers to her co-star as “DJ”, knew he had it in him from the moment they first met on the set of Jungle Cruise and she discovered “he was the opposite of what I’d imagined. He’s so innately contemplative, gentle and softly spoken; I remember saying to him, ‘I’ve realised that The Rock is the performance of a lifetime.’ It got me thinking about what other characters might be lurking in that enormous infrastructure.”
It was Safdie’s interest in Kerr’s story, which entailed narcotic abuse and many professional and romantic upsets, that prompted him to propose a film version to Johnson in the summer of 2023. After six months of groundwork, the two asked Blunt if she’d step aboard.
For her, this was a daunting request: the first time she had been asked to portray a still-living person. (The only comparably intimidating role, she explains, was stepping into Julie Andrews’ Oxford heels for 2018’s Mary Poppins Returns.) Blunt’s nerves were only partly allayed by her subsequent conversations with Staples, who now works as a property developer.
“I asked her [Staples] endless intrusive questions, and promised her I’d be her advocate, even though she was a challenging character, and didn’t always behave in the way we might have liked,” Blunt says. “She had to be very trusting. She knew I was going to show all the nooks and crannies.”
She often found herself messaging Safdie with ideas gleaned from those chats. Staples’ recollections of her and Mark’s athletic love-life – “really quite detailed”, Blunt recalls – informed a scene in which Staples sensuously stretches out her lover’s hamstrings on a gym mat.
Blunt is no stranger to getting buff for a role, as her yoga poses in the 2012 Tom Cruise time-looping action vehicle Edge of Tomorrow glisteningly attest. When, in September, she walked the Venice red carpet for The Smashing Machine, however, social media lit up with talk of how toned she looked – with the obligatory speculation around exactly how she’d achieved this, suggesting everything from facial fillers to out-and-out plastic surgery. The truth, she explains, is simpler and more strenuous: her Prada 2 workout regime.
She lost weight for her return to the role, she says, because “it was important to me that Emily should always look hangry” – a state of agitation brought on by lack of nourishment, m’lud – “so I think the effects of that were what you saw in Venice”. Her trainer Monique Eastwood, who also works with Blunt’s (notably trim) brother-in-law, the actor and renowned foodie Stanley Tucci, cooked up a vigorous exercise plan – yoga, Hiit and Pilates, spread across five weekly sessions – to achieve the desired effect.
Since turning 40, she has trained regularly whether work calls for it or not. “I’ve run towards taking care of myself,” she says. “I’ve got two beautiful children, and I want to keep making physically challenging movies for as long as I can”. (Blunt has been married for 15 years to the American actor and director John Krasinski, with whom she has two daughters, Hazel, 11, and Violet, nine.) “But I do still sometimes feel 42. I’ll be bending down to pick up a towel and catch myself going ‘Eee-aah’.”
In youth-obsessed Hollywood, an actor’s 40s can be tricky to navigate. Opportunities vanish, and there’s a narrowing in the spectrum of available roles. And while Blunt says she hasn’t yet felt the ground move beneath her, “I know it’s coming. I’m not so naive as to think I’ll be immune to the shifts; I don’t think anyone is. I just hope the landscape has changed enough in the last few years that when it comes, I’ll still be able to find variety.”
That drive to try new things has led to a career of discrete chapters: “I definitely went through a bonnet phase; and an action phase with Edge of Tomorrow, Looper and Sicario.” A fruitful recent theme has been difficult wives. Before The Smashing Machine’s Dawn, Blunt was Kitty Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed atomic-age biopic, for which she received her first Oscar nomination in 2023.
Might her starring role in an as yet untitled Steven Spielberg blockbuster, which she shot in New Jersey earlier this year and is reportedly an original UFO story in the Close Encounters style, also fit this pattern? “Sorry, that one’s…” she grins, miming locked lips.
What excites her about these women, she goes on, “is that they don’t get in line. Kitty and Dawn were both required to fit certain moulds, given who they were married to, but couldn’t due to their massive personalities. I have a lot of time for women who are incapable of playing the role the world deems fit for them.”
Blunt has a writerly turn of phrase; books run in the blood. Her mother was an English teacher, while her elder sister Felicity (who married Tucci in 2012, two years after meeting him at Blunt’s wedding to Krasinski) is a literary agent. Felicity keeps her posted on new work that might yield a good role – “she’s always good at slipping me manuscripts of what’s hot” – and indeed, she’s about to star in and produce an adaptation of one of her sister’s recent picks, a short story called Walk the Blue Fields by the Irish author Claire Keegan.
“That will be a tiny movie; very intimate,” Blunt says. “I’ve been part of a lot of big movies, but that doesn’t mean I’m not also on the hunt for smaller ones.”
Recently, she has found herself missing the miniature scale of her 2004 breakthrough, the British coming-of-age romance My Summer of Love, in which she starred alongside Natalie Press. While Press followed it up by sticking firmly to the UK indie scene, working with directors such as Andrea Arnold, Peter Greenaway and Sarah Gavron, Blunt zipped over to Twentieth Century Fox in Los Angeles where she tried out, unsuccessfully, for a role in the 2006 fantasy movie Eragon. Auditions for The Devil Wears Prada happened to be taking place at the same studio, on the same day, so she thought “why not?” and wandered in there too.
Back then, Stanley Tucci was merely a prospective cast-mate. But these days he’s family, and while filming the Prada sequel he’s been making her dinner in the evenings. She will occasionally return the favour, though “it’s slightly nerve-wracking cooking for Stan because he’s so cheffy,” she says. Indeed, so intimidated are people to cook for him that Blunt, her sister and their husbands “never get invited to dinner anywhere. We always end up having to host”.
One can easily picture Dawn or Kitty blowing up over this halfway through the main course: smashed plates, spilt wine, the whole shebang. Is that part of the appeal of playing them?
“I definitely love characters who give you the full weather system,” she says, though she enjoys portraying more streamlined personalities, too. “There’s no strategy to it. Sometimes a character speaks to me. Sometimes I don’t even know why. I just find myself kidnapped by the idea of being them.”
The Smashing Machine is in cinemas from October 2.