(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Thu 11 December 2025 16:15, UK
Emily Blunt has spoken some truly memorable lines of dialogue throughout her two decades in Hollywood. Who can forget her turn as the caustic personal assistant Emily Charlton in 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada?
Of course, most of the dialogue that is so memorable in the film comes down to the performances rather than the words on the page. There is nothing Earth-shattering about phrases like “You think this has nothing to do with you” or “That’s all” until you hear them spoken by Meryl Streep.
It’s to Blunt’s eternal credit that in only her second film, she was able to hold her own against Stanley Tucci, Anne Hathaway, and Her Royal Highness, Queen Meryl.
You could also argue that Blunt’s greatest performance was the one where she said almost nothing whatsoever. 2018’s A Quiet Place saw her emoting every possible sentiment without a sound, including when her character steps on a rusty nail. It earned her a Screen Actors Guild Award.
Even Blunt’s most ardent fans probably wouldn’t name-check one of her films when listing their favourite line of movie dialogue, though. That distinction would surely be bestowed upon something like “Here’s looking at you, kid”, “You had me at ‘Hello’”, “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse”, or, the greatest of them all, “Do you know what happens to a toad when it’s struck by lightning? The same thing that happens to everything else.”
Blunt got to toss her own choice into the ring in an interview with her Smashing Machine co-star Dwayne Johnson for Complex in 2025. When asked to name her favourite, she said “We’re gonna need a bigger boat”, without missing a beat. She was presumably referring to the line from Jaws and not how she felt about the size of the room she was sharing with one of Hollywood’s most physically massive performers.
“We’re gonna need a bigger boat” (or “You’re” if we’re being pedantic) is indeed one of the great lines in cinematic history. Spoken by Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) when he fully grasps the danger of the great white shark he’s hunting, it is not only a moment of deadpan levity in an extremely tense film, but a phrase that can apply to many situations. In fact, the reason it made its way into the film at all is that it had become something of a catchphrase on set.
The production of Jaws was notoriously messy, partly due to the vanishingly small budget. The cast and crew were adamant that the boat in which Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw hunt the shark needed to be bigger, but the producers wouldn’t hear of it. Throughout the production, whenever something went wrong, someone would shout the newly minted catchphrase. Eventually, Scheider started throwing it into scenes until it fit the context.
For the record, The Rock’s favourite line of dialogue is The Godfather Part II’s “You broke my heart, Fredo”, the 20th-century equivalent of Shakespeare’s “Et tu, Brute?” It also works in a wide range of contexts, but only if you’re used to being betrayed by those closest to you.
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