Had things turned out a little differently, I might have been having a chat with Emily Blunt, pop star, today, rather than Emily Blunt, actor.
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True, she's racking up the musical roles – from the film version of Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods in 2014 to the belated sequel Mary Poppins Returns, due out in 2018 – but it's baby steps compared with that brief moment when she was being groomed as The Next Big Thing in pop.
She was young, she says in her defence. "I was 18 and I was just, well, you know, I was 18. I was at that stage of my life where I was like, 'Who cares, yeah, maybe; that sounds cool'. Everything sounds cool other than being in school at 18."
In her last year of secondary education in England she landed an agent, who asked if she was interested in acting. "I said, 'That would be great, sure, I'll give it a go'."
At the same time, her music teacher was nudging her in the direction of a singing career. She had signed a recording contract and even cut a demo. "But then I got terrified and pulled out because I felt they were wanting me to be like Britney Spears," she says. "And I was like, 'I can't dance, and I don't sing like Britney Spears'. I just felt it was snowballing too fast and it wasn't ultimately what I wanted to do."
And what of that demo – will we ever hear it?
Different, yes. But please don't say her characters are strong. Photo: Dan Busta/Corbis Outline
"I hope not," she says with a throaty laugh. "I'm not singing it for you! It was a pop song and it seems so unlike me now. It's like a different person."
Blunt uses the word "different" a lot. It's usually a positive. She says she plays "a lot of different people"; she celebrates the fact she's "allowed to play so many different parts". "I just want to keep playing different characters, keep the mixed bag of it going," she says. "It's what thrills me about acting."
She started landing parts in her late teens, but her breakthrough role came with Pawel Pawlikowski's lesbian-themed thriller My Summer of Love in 2004. The press tour for that film brought her and co-star Natalie Press to Australia; when I tell Blunt I met and interviewed her then, and jokingly say I knew that was the last we'd ever see of her, she laughs heartily. "Exactly," she says. "She's a flash in the pan."
In truth, she's been anything but. The 30 movies she has made, 14 of them as a lead, have taken a combined global box office north of $US2.6 billion, for an average of $US87 million a film (that's a pretty decent effort given few of her films have been blockbusters). Her biggest hit is Edge of Tomorrow (an excellent piece of sci-fi with Tom Cruise), followed by The Devil Wears Prada, but she has demonstrated an admirable range that has seen her sing (Into the Woods), play royalty (The Young Victoria, Gulliver's Travels), and take on beefed-up action roles complete with American accent (Sicario).
Her latest turn, in the big-screen adaptation of the blockbuster novel The Girl on The Train (Paula Hawkins' book has reportedly sold more than 11 million copies since its January 2015 release), takes her into new territory again: her Rachel Watson is a divorced alcoholic who suffers blackouts when she drinks, a tendency that rather hampers her ability to recall the finer points of the murder she thinks she has witnessed, and for which she is a prime suspect.
She only saw what she thinks she saw because she is stalking her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux) from afar: each day she catches the train past the house in which she used to live, spying on him and his new wife Anna (Rebecca Ferguson) and the baby she longs for but is unable to have, while also casting an envious eye over neighbours Megan (Haley Bennett) and Scott (Luke Evans), on whom she projects a fantasy of the perfect marriage.
"I loved the twist in this one, that your main character is a black-out drunk. That was a huge draw for me," says Blunt. "Usually female roles are held in a feminine ideal of some sort, they're required to be perfect and pretty and appealing and 'likeable', which is my least favourite word in the industry right now. It's such a cliche.
As Rachel Watson in The Girl on the Train.
"I loved that you have three very damaged women in this film, and your heroine is somebody that people don't want to breathe the same air as – that was very unusual and complicated to play."
And again, that word: "I hope she's very different from me. I've never played somebody who feels so alien to who I am, and how I operate and how I look at the world."
Blunt is married to the actor John Krasinski, with whom she has two daughters (she discovered she was pregnant with their second child the week before she started work on the film). She says she has a "very happy" home life, whereas Rachel is consumed with self-loathing. "I thought I was very unlike this character until my two-year-old daughter turned up on set and I was looking absolutely horrifically drunk, in this awful make-up, and she didn't even bat an eyelash. And she was like, 'Oh yeah, that's just Mum on a Friday night'. Wow, thanks."
The Girl on the Train has, perhaps inevitably, been compared to Gone Girl; both share an unreliable female narrator, a murder mystery, elements of revenge.
Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl (2014).
But The Girl on the Train perhaps has more in common with Before I Go to Sleep, the 2011 debut novel from S.J. Watson, which was filmed in 2014 with Nicole Kidman, Colin Firth and Mark Strong in the leads. Both are what has been termed domestic thrillers (or domestic noir), with a female character at the heart of the story, the drama unfolding around the home, and trust the central issue (well, that and murder, which frankly doesn't help much with the old trust business).
It's a sub-genre that flourished in the early 1990s, and might include the likes of Fatal Attraction and Single White Female or even Joel Edgerton's excellent 2015 Hollywood directing debut The Gift.
Last year, Edgerton told me he was inspired in writing The Gift by the sort of movies "where the villains were real human beings. The idea that a movie could end and you'd literally turn and look out a window and wonder, 'where are those people in the real world?' ".
Acknowledging his debt to classics of the genre such as Pacific Heights (1990) and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992), he said at the heart of his movie was the question "how well do you know the person you're living with?".
In 2014, I asked Nicole Kidman why she thought stories such as Before I Go to Sleep appealed.
"I think it plays on a deep psychological level … It plays into a universal fear – do you ever really know your partner," she said. "And the idea of a man completely controlling a woman, and the power of that, the way he controls her whole world, is really creepy."
Mark Strong and Nicole Kidman in Before I Go to Sleep (2014).
I put the same question to Blunt, an actress who, like Kidman, seems to exude intelligence both on screen and off.
"They feel close to home," she says simply. "People can imagine themselves living these lives, the characters are very relatable, in relatable situations, yet at the same time these rather high-octane occurrences are happening.
"A 'domestic thriller' almost sounds a little demeaning in a way," she continues. "It doesn't sound very broad or weighty. And yet there's a reason these stories are working – and at core it's because people see themselves in them, and that should be acknowledged as a good thing."
If she's right that the domestic thriller is sometimes seen as a lesser form, I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that it is by and large a female-led genre. Certainly there is in many of these tales a theme of a woman (or women) emerging from a state of oppression or befuddlement, overthrowing a powerful male figure who has deliberately constructed a set of lies that keep her metaphorically imprisoned. They are, I'd argue, tales of feminist empowerment masquerading as genre films.
Blunt agrees. "I think they're not to be mistaken for being submissive characters," she says of the protagonists of these films. "You sort of feel excited to see them emerge from their previous situations."
I feel like we're on a roll now, so I observe that she seems to be consistently drawn to strong female characters. It's a bad move, and not just for the obvious reason that Rachel is an utter mess and, in so many ways, the opposite of strong.
"I find that a little eye-rolling, if I'm honest," she says, chidingly but still rather charmingly. "You would never describe, for example, any of George Clooney's characters as being 'strong'. You would just assume that is a given. You would never have to say to Bruce Willis, 'Oh wow, you play really strong characters'.
Singing for her supper: Blunt with James Corden in Into the Woods (2014).
"I think it's something people like to use for female roles because they're not very 'feminine' or they're more opinionated or they just have, I guess, a more forthright way. And yet I know so many women who are like that, who are very together, very confident.
"I think it's a mistake to label female characters as 'strong' because they have a brain and they know how to string a sentence together and they have an opinion. Those are the women I like to hang out with."
You're right, I offer meekly. They're the women I like to hang out with, too. So if strong is the wrong word, maybe it would be better to say you tend to play rounded characters, characters with plenty of meat on their bones.
"I like that," she says. "The older I get, now I have kids, I'm very specific about when I work, and I just want to make sure what I do has meat on it, as you say. Something for me to bite into.
"I like playing women who are multi-faceted," she adds. "I don't like playing characters you can sum up in one line."
Well, no. If she did, she just might have become a pop singer instead.
Five classic domestic thrillers
Suspicion (1941)
Joan Fontaine is a rich girl who suspects her penniless playboy husband, played by Cary Grant, is planning to murder her for the life insurance money. Alfred Hitchcock brilliantly employs Grant's charm as a threatening device here; there's ambiguity of intention in everything he does.
Fatal Attraction (1987)
Adrian Lyne's smash hit is an allegorical goldmine: it's about AIDS, it's a feminist revenge tale, it's an anti-feminist backlash story. In simplest terms, it stars Michael Douglas as a man who cheats on his wife, then finds hell hath no fury like a one-night stand scorned. Glenn Close is seriously scary as the woman who gave the world the phrase "bunny boiler".
Malice (1993)
In 2014, Nicole Kidman starred in Before I Go to Sleep, in which she played a woman who wakes up each day with no memory of what happened the day before. So maybe Our Nic simply forgot she'd been here before, her breakout film Dead Calm (1989) being a domestic thriller at sea, and Malice a convoluted tale of betrayal that had her cast as the villain. Bill Pullman plays her husband, and Alec Baldwin is also in it, as a doctor with the biggest God complex ever.
Gone Girl (2014)
Gillian Flynn's novel has reportedly sold more than 15 million copies; David Fincher's film is a faithful adaptation aided immeasurably by having Ben Affleck, the man the world loves to hate, as Nick Dunne, the man the world loves to hate. But it's Rosamund Pike's film, really. Her Amy is appealing, angry, deceitful, damaged. Even if you know the ending it's a great ride.
The Gift (2015)
Written and directed by and co-starring Australian Joel Edgerton, this is a taut thriller about a happy couple (Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall) whose lives begin to unravel after his old schoolmate (Edgerton) unexpectedly enters the frame. Edgerton expertly plays with and subverts the conventions of the genre. Terrific.