Emily’s magical makeover
The actress takes on the role of a lifetime
Sailing gleefully above London with a carpet bag in one hand and her magic umbrella in the other, Emily Blunt looks about as Mary Poppins as you can get – from the top of her jauntily tipped hat to the soles of her sensible shoes. But as any actress worth her salt will tell you, appearances can be deceiving!
Playing the beloved flying nanny in Mary Poppins Returns – a sequel to the iconic 1964 original – Emily admits she was terrified as she dangled from a crane, appearing to defy the forces of gravity. “I thought I was all right with heights,” cringes the mum-oftwo. “And then I kept going higher and I was like, ‘I only have one wire stopping me from plummeting to the ground!’”
Flying high is something the Girlon the Train star should be used to by now. When director Rob Marshall called to offer her the role of Mary – a character Dame Julie Andrews made her own more than half a century ago – he was clear she was the only actress he wanted for the part and if she turned him down, the project wouldn’t go ahead.
“I felt my hair blow back, I was so stunned,” laughs Emily, 35, who has daughters Hazel, four, and Violet, two, with actor husband John Krasinski, 39.
It wasn’t until she shared the news with friends that she realised what a big deal it was to step into the shoes of a screen icon. Her friend remarked, “Oof, you’ve got balls of steel!” And Emily recalls, “I remember feeling a slight panic creeping in.” Mary Poppins Returns is set in Depression-era London, 25 years after the original, and child protagonists Michael and Jane Banks are now adults. Michael’s three children Georgie, John and Anabel are struggling after the death of their mother, and to make matters worse, their house is about to be repossessed. If ever there was a need for a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious nanny, this is it! Enter Emily. But rather than doing a “cheap interpretation” of Julie’s Mary, British-born Emily has
put her own “meaner, more stern” spin on the magical super-nanny and was thrilled to find herself teaming up once again with her Devil Wears Prada co-star Meryl Streep, who plays Mary’s eccentric cousin Topsy.
“I adore being around her and I love breathing the same air as her all day,” says Emily, adding that everyone on set was gob-smacked one day when Meryl, 69, asked the children acting in the movie if they’d seen a pratfall.
Emily laughs, “The kids were like, ‘No,’ and she goes, ‘Watch this.’ And she stood vertical, then fell flat on her face and hit the deck. I thought she was dead. That’s it – that’s how Meryl Streep dies. Everyone gasped and ran forward, and she stood up and said, ‘I learned that at Yale.’ She is so awesome. She was the kids’ hero after that!”
Screen legend Julie, now 83, turned down $1.4 million to appear in the sequel. “She didn’t want to show up in the movie and for people to think the ‘real’ Mary Poppins is here,” says Emily. “I thought that was very thoughtful of her.”
Despite more than five decades separating their versions of the “rude, vain but funny” nanny, the two women have remarkably similar stories about how it all began. Julie was offered the role a day after giving birth to her daughter Emma, now 56, while Emily was offered the role just six weeks after welcoming Violet.
Like Julie, Emily negotiated a delay in production and, five months later, she started work with a breast pump at the ready. “Mary Pumpins! That’s what it felt like,” she laughs. “It was ridiculous!”
All that pumping is fading into the past now that the drums are beating for an Oscar nomination, but Emily has yet to win over her biggest critics – her daughters.
“They loathe to see me on screen,” she grins. “When I was doing MaryPoppins, I would FaceTime Hazel and she would be like, ‘Take that silly old Mary Poppins wig off.’ They’re creepily obsessed with Julie Andrews.”