“You spend the whole time acting tough and saying tough things”
Emily Blunt. Credit: Manny Carabel/FilmMagic.
Emily Blunt has said that “strong female leads” are the “worst thing ever”.
The actor reflected on the scripts she receives for new projects, saying that she loves characters “with a secret” but dislikes tropes around femininity.
Discussing her new role in The English, in which she plays aristocrat Lady Cornelia Locke, Blunt told The Telegraph: “I love a character with a secret. And I loved Cornelia’s buoyancy, her hopefulness, her guilelessness.
“It’s the worst thing ever when you open a script and read the words ‘strong female lead’. That makes me roll my eyes – I’m already out. I’m bored.”
She went on: “Those roles are written as incredibly stoic, you spend the whole time acting tough and saying tough things. Cornelia is more surprising than that,” Blunt explained.
“She’s innocent without being naive and that makes her a force to be reckoned with. She startles Eli out of his silence and their differences become irrelevant because they need each other to survive. I thought that was very cool.”
Emily Blunt will next star in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, alongside Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr, Florence Pugh, Jack Quaid, Matt Damon, Kenneth Branagh and Benny Safdie.
Murphy leads the cast as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who is widely credited as the “father of the atomic bomb” for his role in the Manhattan Project.
Oppenheimer will be Nolan’s first film with Universal after parting ways with his long-standing studio Warner Bros.
