At the UK premiere of his new sci-fi blockbuster Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg was rhapsodising about his leading lady. He’d been in awe of Emily Blunt, he said, ever since she stole the show in The Devil Wears Prada back in 2006. “This is a force of nature and one of the nicest people in the world,” he added. “I’m so lucky that she liked our script.”
He is far from the only one so smitten. Adored by everyone from teenage boys to their grandmothers – and claimed by the Americans as one of their own, after she obtained dual citizenship in 2015 – Blunt has parlayed that affection into a reported $80m fortune and a stint among Forbes’s highest-paid actresses. Part of her appeal may be the absence of fuss: no tabloid melodramas, no whiff of the diva. The rest is sheer reliability. Who else could have travelled from the period swoon of The Young Victoria (2009) to the alien invasion of Disclosure Day, by way of musicals, weepies and the life-or-death hush of post-apocalyptic survival thrillers, with only one real failure (2020’s Wild Mountain Thyme)?
Hollywood, which prizes a safe pair of hands above almost everything, has turned her into a mainstay: Denis Villeneuve made her the lead in Sicario (2015), Christopher Nolan steered her to an Oscar nomination in Oppenheimer (2023), and now Spielberg has built an entire narrative around her.
Blessed with a pair of sleepy, half-mast eyes that can switch from drowsy to mesmerising in a heartbeat, she harnesses a clipped RP voice with a teasing lilt. At her disposal is an arsenal of technique most actors would kill for. But it is shading that truly sets her apart – an ability, honed in everything from The Devil Wears Prada to Oppenheimer, to locate the desperation beneath the disdain, the tenderness that makes each character plausibly human.
Trotting into view on horseback in Paweł Pawlikowski’s My Summer of Love (2004), the then 21-year-old made a head-turning first impression in the role of a smirking, privileged tearaway. Then came the part that made her. Cast as cut-glass fashionista Emily Charlton in The Devil Wears Prada, all brittle hauteur and hidden hurt, she was iconic. “I could’ve played her bitchier,” Blunt has said, “but bitchy gets boring.” Quite.
If there is a through-line to Blunt’s career, it is refusing to have one. She is a protean talent, just as at ease portraying unlikeable characters as the ones we love. “There is still a pressure to be likeable,” she told The Guardian in 2023, “and men are not held to that same standard. No one cared if Leonardo DiCaprio was likeable in The Wolf of Wall Street.”
As an alcoholic divorcée embroiled in murderous intrigue in The Girl on the Train (2016), she was sodden and hollow-eyed, plumbing Leaving Las Vegas depths of dissolution while never quite forfeiting our sympathy. Coiled into a knot of rancour for Nolan as Kitty Oppenheimer, atomic-age wife and former communist, she earned a long-overdue first Oscar nomination. (“The brat is down. Where are the martinis?”) Even in the exhilarating time loops of Edge of Tomorrow (2014), holding her own as Tom Cruise’s steelier superior, she smuggled dry humour and weariness in behind the armour. In lighter mode, too, she effervesces: as the Baker’s Wife in Rob Marshall’s otherwise misfiring Into the Woods (also 2014), she was the best thing in it, wringing mischief from every glance and hesitation, while delivering Sondheim’s tongue-twisters with their wit intact.
And sometimes, she’s simply enchanting. Stepping into Julie Andrews’s magically out-turned shoes for Mary Poppins Returns (2018), she was practically perfect: strait-laced yet anarchic, dropping her aitches and letting her decorum slip during a music-hall turn with Lin-Manuel Miranda. It helps that she has never taken herself too seriously: after all, this is a woman who greeted the savage reviews of her Oirish-accented Wild Mountain Thyme with gales of laughter.
The privately educated daughter of a Wandsworth barrister, Blunt came to acting almost by accident, coaxed out of a childhood stutter by a teacher who suggested she try a funny voice in the school play. She was signed by an agent while still at Hurtwood House, the Surrey sixth-form college known for its performing arts. Today she lives in Brooklyn Heights with her husband and co-star in A Quiet Place, the actor-director John Krasinski, and their two daughters.
As a family, they’ll be able to enjoy Disclosure Day together, with Spielberg in his warmest, most sentimental (but not saccharine) mode. Expertly crafted, with dizzying set pieces, the film completes a loose triptych of wonder begun nearly half a century ago with Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and ET the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Inevitably, Blunt is brilliant. Playing Kansas City weather forecaster Margaret Fairchild, who gains powers of telepathy and glossolalia after a brush with something otherworldly, she is by turns skittish and spellbinding. “While there’s phenomenal performance work across the board,” wrote The Independent in its four-star review, “it’s Blunt who really shines.”
Spielberg, then, has chosen well. His film rests on the faith that an audience will follow Blunt anywhere – into an atelier, a war zone, a time loop, a close encounter – simply because it is her. Whatever the part, she beckons us all the way.
‘Disclosure Day’ is out now in cinemas
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