A quiet reflection
Although Emily Blunt believed not everything should be sequel-ised, she eventually began to wonder if her ‘snobbery’ was turning into ‘idiocy’. She talks to Sonaiya Kelley.
Just before Covid hit hard last year, Emily Blunt was poised to have a huge northern summer. The star of A Quiet Place
Part II was in the middle of promotion for the sequel to the blockbuster original when the film’s director, her husband, John Krasinski, announced the postponement of the movie’s release. It was March 12, 2020, just before the entire United States shut down.
Suddenly forced into quarantine, Blunt dived into reading books and scripts. She homeschooled her two kids, then 3 and 6 years old. She had guest spots in family members’ quarantine projects, most notably Krasinski’s Some Good News and brother-in-law
Stanley Tucci’s viral cocktail tutorials on Instagram.
Now, more than a year later, she’s back in the spotlight, not only with A Quiet Place Part II, which opened in Kiwi cinemas this week, but with Disney’s
Jungle Cruise in July – two blockbuster releases that many hope will reinvigorate the struggling box office.
‘‘It’s just been mad,’’ says Blunt. ‘‘We’re on the other side of it [now], so I’m feeling sort of hopeful.’’
A Quiet Place Part II, Krasinski’s follow-up to his critically and commercially successful 2018 sci-fi horror film, is a portrait of a family in crisis. After the loss in the first film of her husband (played by The Office alum Krasinski), Blunt’s Evelyn Abbott has to find a way to survive with three kids in a post-apocalyptic world where terrifying creatures hunt humans by sound.
‘‘The movie is made for theatres, so I’m relieved and grateful that we waited and were given the support to wait,’’ Blunt says. ‘‘Because I do believe that it’s an event movie, and I think to gain the full experience you’ve got to watch it in a theatre.
‘‘It’s weird that it was almost about to come out and then it didn’t,’’ says Blunt. ‘‘But we just had to ride it out and wait for the right moment. And I think John always felt quite sure that he’d like it to be one of the first movies back in theatres.’’
Krasinski says: ‘‘It’s certainly a bizarre circumstance to go through all of the motions to come out with a movie and then to have to put it back in the box.
‘‘But the truth is, as bizarre as that was, it doesn’t hold a candle to all the other things that everyone else has been going through, so we just took it in stride.’’
One bright spot about the delay is that the film’s themes of isolation and the value of community likely will feel much more resonant now.
‘‘I think it was pretty wild to see what we were dealing with so clearly in this movie thematically was happening very physically in the world only months later,’’ Krasinski says.
‘‘There are themes that run
through it of keeping to yourself and not extending your hand to your neighbour,’’ Blunt says. ‘‘So I think that idea of tiptoeing out there into the big bad world is probably resonating with people more so now.’’
Despite the success of the first film, the couple had been ready to walk away from the burgeoning Quiet Place franchise.
‘‘I don’t believe that everything
should be sequel-ised,’’ Blunt said in a separate interview in March last year.
‘‘I think that was why we had our heels dug in at the idea of one; we just weren’t entertaining the thought of it.’’
The couple knew that the studio was planning to move forward with a sequel whether or not they were involved, but were firmly against revisiting
the story until Krasinski came up with an idea for Part II’s opening sequence while in Kauai with Blunt when she was in production for Jungle Cruise.
‘‘He goes, ‘I have an idea for how I would open it if I did it, but I’m not saying I would’,’’ Blunt recalls. ‘‘And I was a bit cautious. But he started to pitch it and I just felt like my eyes got wider and wider. It was just undeniable.
‘‘We’re very honest with each other. He always knows when I’m for real or not. So when he saw how arrested I was by it, it became pretty apparent that he was going to write it.
‘‘I think that’s when I started to realise, ‘Is my snobbery turning into idiocy?’’’ she adds. ‘‘I wanted to be in that sequence. I would want to do that film whether it’s a sequel or not. I said to him, ‘We need to approach this as if someone is just turning the page – and it’s the continuation’. And if you are at all invested in this family, you’re going to want to see what happens to them.’’
Krasinski hadn’t intended to return as director. ‘‘But I just said, ‘If you don’t direct it, I’m not going to do it’,’’ says Blunt. ‘‘So then he had to do it. That’s where it helps being the wifey.’’
A Quiet Place Part II is now showing in cinemas.