Our Take Ten guest this week is Emily Blunt. Hot on the heels of her eighth Golden Globe nomination — this time for her performance in The Smashing Machine — Blunt sat down with us to tackle questions on The Devil Wears Prada 2, where things are at with A Quiet Place Part III and, most importantly, her favorite karaoke song.
We also got into the most British thing she still does after spending many years in the U.S. and what job she’d do for a year just for fun if she got the chance.
In the Benny Safdie-directed A24 film The Smashing Machine, Blunt stars opposite her old friend Dwayne Johnson, with whom she worked previously on Jungle Cruise. The Smashing Machine tells the real-life story of MMA fighter Mark Kerr (Johnson) and his partner Dawn Staples (Blunt) as they love and fight their way through career pressures and addiction.
Emily Blunt as Dawn Staples and Dwayne Johnson as Mark Kerr in ‘The Smashing Machine’
Ken Hirama/A24/Courtesy Everett Collection
Of her longtime friend Johnson being perfect for this role, Blunt said, “I think he has the innate vulnerability and humility and eloquence that Mark had. And I think on a personal level, he was so hungry for challenge and to disappear. There was such a willingness in him to really go elsewhere. You can see it this relief at being able to be someone else and not be ‘The Rock’. It was really, really beautiful to watch him do it.”
To play the role of Staples, Blunt went deep into some contentious arguments — the worst of which drove her to sample some tequila she jokes, as a “form of therapy” because it was so brutal. “It’s a life changing argument,” she said of that scene. “Really life-altering in what happens with the characters. But I think those kinds of scenes, they do have an impact on me because of the places you go to. They’re hard on you. They’re hard to come down from, and I don’t remember that much from the last section of the argument in the bathroom. I remember him breaking the door down, but I don’t remember much else and it was such a blur and it gets so violent and so awful that we were all pretty shaky after it. And it’s not like you look forward to those scenes. I’m actually terrified in the lead up to doing them. It’s not that I relish it, like ‘Oh, this will be so fun to sink my teeth into.’ I’m really filled with a lot of dread. And maybe that helps.”
Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt seen on the set of ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ in July in New York City.
Photo by Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images
While Blunt would not be drawn on details of The Devil Wears Prada 2 (“Never. I will not. I can’t. Can’t. They’ll get so mad.”) she did look back on the first The Devil Wears Prada film in terms of gaining a family member: “My brother-in-law, Mr. Stanley Tucci. We would stand outside and laugh and giggle and I just wept with laughter with him, and then I took him away as a friend and then he wormed his way into my family and married my sister! He met her at our wedding and thought, ‘This is how I become a Blunt.’”
Blunt also revealed the current status of the next installment in A Quiet Place, which is being written, directed and produced by her husband John Krasinski, her go-to comfort-watch movies, her best life advice, and the clothing and props she both wishes she had stolen from sets and that she actually did steal.
To watch Take Ten with Emily Blunt, click on the video above.
The Smashing Machine is available to watch on streaming platforms now.
