When she isn’t crawling around in the desert dust, Emily Blunt is wearing beautiful gowns as an ice queen
Sitting like a mannequin, her hair and makeup assistant hovering as she readies herself for her Cannes press day, Emily Blunt is resplendent in a white gown of the kind we see in fairytales. Yet Sicario, the movie she is promoting, is far from the stuff of fantasy.
It's a gritty film about the American Government taking on the Mexican drug cartels, and we observe the action through the eyes of Blunt's character, FBI agent Kate Macer. It represents a high point in the career of the 32-year-old British actress as it's her remit to bring nuance and truth into a serious story that is not so far from reality.
Set over an intense three days around the Mexican border, Kate gets down and dirty with two imposing blokes, enigmatic agent Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) and former hitman (or sicario) Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), who ultimately have a scurrilous plan to undermine her.
"I think with Kate, Denis [director Villeneuve] wanted a mix of strength and fragility," Blunt says. "Kate is a competent agent but her ideals are torn to shreds by this group she's working with, physically and mentally."
Luckily Brolin and Del Toro were like pussycats away from the cameras. "They were very sweet and I got lots of attention," Blunt says. "They were the combination of being fatherly and like the brother who pulls your hair."
Filming in the New Mexico desert must have been hot and sweaty? "I think we all smelled, to be honest. July-August in New Mexico was not the freshest climate."
Blunt describes Kate Macer as a gender-neutral role, and not just because she had her share of sweat. "I like that action-driven roles for women are becoming less of an anomaly and more something we're embracing. I've been sent a lot of those since Edge of Tomorrow [in which she co-starred with Tom Cruise] but I haven't done any of them because I don't want to be pigeon-holed."
Blunt has also become choosy since she became a mum to 17-month-old Hazel with her actor husband John Krasinsky (The Office). She explains how her hubby is on Daddy duty back home in rural Ojai, California, so they can maintain their daughter's routine. "Motherhood changes you infinitely in a rather overwhelming way," she admits. "I took six months off after Sicario. When you have a kid it has to be worth it to take that time away. It costs you a lot emotionally."
The daughter of Oliver Blunt, a defence QC, who is one of the UK's leading criminal barristers, and Joanna, a former actress who gave up her career to raise her four children, Blunt knows what having a tight family is all about. Her parents helped her though her debilitating childhood stutter, a condition that runs in the family and which she says Hazel so far has not inherited.
"Between the ages of 7 and 12 I had it really badly. The more I worked on it, it got increasingly better and now I've grown out of it," she explains. In many ways the stutter led to her acting, as doing impersonations and silly voices helped her get her point across.
Blunt first appeared at age 17 in an Edinburgh Festival play but it was in The Royal Family alongside Judi Dench that she made her breakthrough on London's West End. She then shone in a wide range of movie roles, as Meryl Streep's assistant in The Devil Wears Prada, as the fledgling 19th century British monarch in The Young Victoria and as Amy Adams' renegade sister in Kiwi Christine Jeffs' Sunshine Cleaning, also filmed in New Mexico.
She learned the strictures of a ballet dancer for The Adjustment Bureau with Matt Damon and sang in this year's Into The Woods, again alongside Streep. (She of course sang on former boyfriend Michael Buble's 2007 cover of Me and Mrs Jones and inspired his 2007 Grammy-nominated ballad Everything.)
At the time of our interview, Blunt was filming The Huntsman with Chris Hemsworth, "a best friend of mine" as well as "Charlize [Theron] and Jessica [Chastain]". She was pleased to be looking glamorous in her latest effort, which indeed is like a dark fairy tale.
"I'm playing a snow queen, the ice villain and I have the most insane costumes. They're so beautiful," she notes with great aplomb.
"The other day, Jessica and Chris were down in the dirt doing a fight scene ¬- they're the warriors and it's all mucky and Jess is in stunt training all day. I then come in and cast a spell and be like, 'See you next week!' I love it!
"And because I'm wearing these incredibly expensive dresses I have five people waiting on me, asking, 'Do you need a chair? Let's put a coat on you. Let's cover the dress.' And Jess is given a box to sit on. It's great."
Blunt has also filmed the comedy animation Animal Crackers with Krasinsky. "It's the first thing we've done together and it was nice because we'd confer, 'Why don't you do this or say this?'
"You have your own intimate comedy and that's what you do at home. So you infuse that into it and it gave the scenes a lot of life. I was nervous at first but now we've decided we'll have to do a movie or a play next."
As a Bostonian, she says Krasinsky is quite an Anglophile in many ways. "There are great similarities in the way we grew up. There's a slight irreverence about both cultures and an ability to laugh at life. I think we both have that."
