Emily Blunt on Her Next Big Project—Motherhood

Eve MacSweeney


Emily Blunt
Emily Blunt

Emily Blunt has won over Hollywood with her effortless wit and wry, British charm. Now she's embarking on her most ambitious production yet: motherhood.

"It's really the coolest thing that's ever happened to me," says Emily Blunt of imminent motherhood. Never mind her debut on the London stage at eighteen alongside Judi Dench, directed by Peter Hall; the Golden Globe she won for her performance in the BBC movie Gideon's Daughter, with Bill Nighy; acting opposite Matt Damon, Ewan McGregor, Meryl Streep (twice), and swinging on wires in an "exosuit" with Tom Cruise in this summer's sci-fi spectacular Edge of Tomorrow. On a sunny January afternoon in Los Angeles, Blunt couldn't be more excited about the baby "pretzeled in there," as she puts it, a month or so away from birth.

"I feel good," she says, "although I do wake up feeling like my grandmother. I sleep with a fortress of pillows around me. I've got one of those huge C-shaped ones," she adds. "My husband calls it Gary."


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Blunt is dressed in a navy silk T-shirt and silk drawstring harem pants, an Isabel Marant cardigan-jacket that can accommodate a pregnancy in progress (it's currently fastened a third of the way down), and gladiator sandals. Her toenails are painted a shade debatable between "fluorescent salmon" (my suggestion) and "undercooked salmon" (hers), and she is wearing a pair of Carrera sunglasses belonging to her husband, the actor and writer John Krasinski. We're off to have coffee and take in a spot of maternity-and-post-maternity shopping, leaving Krasinski, newly sprung from a nine-year commitment on The Office, at home in his "writing cave" working on a movie script.

Blunt first grabbed our attention with her movie-stealing turn as a fashion-world assistant in 2006's The Devil Wears Prada, when she was 22. ("I couldn't have been more surprised that she was that young," remarks Streep, who was struck by her "clear, confident comic instincts. Her humor is self-deflective in the manner of people much more veteran.") Her line in that movie, "I'm hearing this [duck-quacking hand gesture] and I wanna hear this [finger and thumb pinched shut]," has become an immortal screen moment-as well as a useful tool in raising children. Everything about Blunt is infused with a pleasant irony, starting with her disembodied voice talking through the intercom at the gate of her rental house in the Hollywood Hills (the couple's permanent home nearby is under renovation), which is full of character: part warm welcome, part sardonic twang.

It's a quality that has enabled the 31-year-old Blunt to steer her way through a surprising variety of roles in a busy decade-plus career, from costume dramas to indie curiosities to big-budget thrillers to, most recently, the movie version of Stephen Sondheim's musical Into the Woods. Even in a four-square romantic comedy like 2012's The Five-Year Engagement, in which she stars opposite Jason Segel, Blunt brings such idiosyncratic charm to the girlfriend role it's as though she's found a fresh way to throw out convention and make eccentricity mainstream.


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In person Blunt is relaxed and friendly, and she laughs a lot. She began acting to help conquer a childhood stutter, and her career took off virtually of its own accord. "She takes the work incredibly seriously, but she doesn't take herself seriously at all," observes James Corden, opposite whom she acts in Into the Woods. At a neighborhood café festooned with chintz and chandeliers, Blunt talks about the extraordinary year she's had. "It's hard to find fantastic female parts, and I feel like I found two of them," she says. To prepare for Doug Liman's Edge of Tomorrow, she endured three months of Krav Maga martial-arts training and gymnastics before going to work in an 85-pound costume with assault weapons built onto the arms and legs, held together by a steel plate. The shoot was so physically demanding, she says, "I looked like an aerobics teacher by the end of it. It was almost unattractive." Even Tom Cruise-here she inhales sharply and grits her teeth to keep smiling, in imitation of the tirelessly upbeat actor-admitted to her that he found it "a challenge."

Now, she says, "I understand what it takes to get in that kind of shape. And when I got pregnant, not long after I finished the movie, it helped me to keep active." The result is a gorgeous pregnant person: all lean, glowing limbs plus bump. In the earlier stages, she did core exercises and Pilates; lately she favors hiking in the hills, where she sometimes has to dodge paparazzi leaping out of bushes who can't resist stalking a burgeoning Hollywood family.

Read the rest of the article, exclusively at Vogue.com.

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