Wild for the West
EMILY BLUNT SADDLES UP IN HUGO BLICK’S SERIES THE ENGLISH, HER FIRST FORAY INTO A WESTERN
Eagle-eyed, beachgoing starspotters might notice a special guest in Australian waters this summer. A-lister Emily Blunt is about to head to Sydney for the actionthriller The Fall Guy – currently filming with Ryan Gosling – and she has some unfinished business to attend to while she’s here.
“I did attempt surfing on Bondi Beach, which went horribly wrong, but it was very funny,” the Edge Of Tomorrow and Mary Poppins Returns star says of her last trip Down Under. “I think I was hysterically laughing for most of it.
I am a terrible surfer – and I aim to try to remedy that with this trip. I love Australia. I think it’s an extraordinary place and can’t wait to be in Sydney for a good stretch.”
Blunt also hopes there are some close encounters with cuddly wildlife, with husband John Krasinski and their two young daughters Hazel and Violet also set to soak up the summer rays.
“All of us are coming,” she confirms. “We’re going to just escape the New York winter and go towards the light – I can’t wait.”
In the meantime, Blunt is keen to talk about her new passion project, The English, a six-part western that streams on Amazon Prime Video from today. Not only does she star as pampered British aristocrat Lady Cornelia Locke who travels to the US Wild West in the 1890s hellbent on vengeance against the man who killed her son, it also marks her first producing credit. So taken was she with what she saw as a fresh take on a wellworn genre, and a character who discovers a steely resolve and resilience with the help of Native American former soldier Eli Whipp (Twilight actor Chaske Spencer), she signed on after reading the first page of writer-director Hugo
Blick’s script, then mobilised her considerable star power and influence to help get it made.
“I’d never been in a western and this one felt fresh,” she says.
“Even within the genre, it was carving out new space for itself. It was as violent as it was witty,
and yet it had this beautiful love story at its centre that also felt new for this genre that is
often quite masculine and brutal. Even though our show explores that and is cut-throat and violent she’s not the damsel tied to a tree at all. And I adored that about her.” Westerns were a big deal for Blunt’s parents, Joanna, a former actor and teacher, and barrister Oliver, and she remembers them being on in the
house when she grew up in London. And while her mother leaned towards certified three-hankie weepies such as Old Yeller (“I was completely ruined by it”) and Shane, her dad introduced her to the “much more hard-core ones” like Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Clint Eastwood’s 1991 Oscarwinning masterpiece Unforgiven.
“It’s such an exciting, elevated genre,” she says. “It’s a genre with great swagger and cool factor in those epic landscapes and the loneliness of the characters, and how you can’t trust anyone and the restoration of justice. All of it is stuff that was just so juicy and it’s certainly a world I wanted to be in.”
Having had their plans to film first in the US and then Canada thwarted last year by Covid, the production team ended up filming The English in Spain, which is where many of the old spaghetti westerns were shot.
The sweltering heat – “I have never been hotter in my life” – and dust were exacerbated by Blunt’s period costume of woollen pants, skirt, shirt, waistcoat, jacket and a corset that acted like a heat trap. Then there was the small matter of Blunt being allergic to horses.
While she’d ridden a little as a
child – and may have exaggerated her skills professionally in the past – the many horseback scenes as Cornelia and Whipp traverse the wild and dangerous countryside required an entirely different level of commitment, especially with her restrictive costume.
“Everyone says on their CV they can horse ride,” Blunt says with a laugh. “I mean, we all say we can do it, just in the hope you’ll get the gig. It was quite interesting to do a western and be highly allergic to horses but I really loved the prep for it. I loved learning how to ride properly so you look at one with the horse. I needed three men and a stepladder to get me on to the horse with all the dresses and the corset – they gave me a stretchy corset that had some give but not enough really. There was never going to be a world where Cornelia was seen leaping on to the horse. I was like, ‘It’s never going to happen’.”
Having acquired a taste for producing, Blunt is keen to do more, seeing it as official recognition of what she has been doing in her work for years. Husband Krasinski, who directed her in horror hit A Quiet Place and its sequel and has been producing projects for more than a decade, encouraged her to step up but until now she’d never dared ask for fear of looking bad.
“I’ve always been interested in every facet of every project I’m in – whether it’s invited or not,” she says. “But I’ve loved the creative part of producing and I’ve sort of done it on most films I’ve worked on. I think going forward if something is brought to me or if it’s an idea I have or a book that I bought, it certainly makes sense to ask for that credit.”