Blunt FORCE
EMILY BLUNT is in the saddle as an avenging mother in an epic Wild West saga
The English Thursday, 9pm, BBC2 (box set, BBC iplayer)
EMILY BLUNT CASTS off her practically-perfect role as magical nanny
Mary Poppins as she takes on a very different part this week – a guntoting mother out for revenge in BBC2’S
Western drama series The English.
‘Westerns are a world I’ve never been in before,’ reveals
Blunt. ‘It’s such a mythic story place – a world built on brutality, loss, and a need to reclaim who you are. I’d only read two pages of the script when I was completely captivated by this violent, dangerous yet romantic world.’
SECRETS AND LIES
In the gripping six-part drama, Blunt plays Lady Cornelia Locke, an aristocratic Englishwoman who arrives in the American
West in 1890, determined to find the man she holds responsible for her son’s death.
Heading for the newly-built town of Hoxem, Wyoming, she meets a Native American ex-cavalry scout, Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), and the pair embark on a harrowing journey across a violent, bloody landscape.
But as their journey leads to romance, an investigation by Hoxem’s sheriff
(played by Stephen Rea) into a series of macabre murders brings Cornelia and Eli face-to-face with their shared past.
‘What I love about The English is that it’s as witty as it is brutal, as beautiful as it is violent,’ says Blunt, who won a Golden Globe for her last TV role in 2006 BBC drama Gideon’s Daughter. ‘The series moves like a chase thriller, but there’s a tender love story at its core.’
Not that viewers will expect Cornelia to last long in the lawless Wild West when she steps off a stagecoach in the first episode in her best dress…
‘She shows up in a beautiful lacy pink dress in this brutal, masculine dust-bowl of a world and seems totally ill-prepared for the journey ahead,’ smiles Blunt. ‘You’re hit by so many questions. Why is she here? Who is this guy she’s after? What happened to her son? And, later, what’s this courage within her? I love a character with a secret. She goes through this remarkable transformation, and what she discovers about herself is that she’s a force to be reckoned with.’
The title of the series comes from the term used to refer to American settlers, regardless of the countries they originally came from – and the cast of characters includes a racist hotelier (Ciarán Hinds) and a psychopathic businessman (Rafe Spall).
RIDING HIGH
‘Ciarán was a hoot,’ says Blunt. ‘I was giddy trying to get through a scene where we had to eat prairie oysters together – I loved it so much. And Rafe comes into the show like a dangerous Ferrari.
His character is lethal.’ Blunt, 39, spent four months learning to ride before filming began in Spain.
‘Filming got delayed because of COVID-19, so I rode horses every week for months on end,’ she reveals. ‘It was like an outlet for me when everyone was inside, and I learned how to really ride – not just hold on for dear life.
‘But the worst thing about filming was doing action scenes in a corset,’ she adds. ‘It was so awful, especially because we shot in Spain in the summer and it was so breathtakingly hot. The corset acted like an oven on my organs. There was no breathing space!’
‘There’s a tender love story at its core’
EMILY BLUNT