Emily Blunt enjoys magic of movie making – just forget the red carpets

While parts of Hollywood – like red carpet appearances – don’t sit comfortably with Emily Blunt, she concedes she is one of the lucky ones. That includes shooting The Fall Guy in Sydney.

Emily Blunt is acutely aware she is one of the lucky ones.

Grateful for her lot in life, while conceding there are parts of Hollywood that don’t sit comfortably with her, the 41-year-old is refreshingly honest about the business she is in.

“As I get older and I do this longer, I recognise that it’s a business that you have to wear a helmet in and it can knock you around sometimes but, if you get to be a part of the magical side of it, it’s something you should be really grateful for,” Blunt tells Insider.

“I feel just so lucky really. I get to do something that I’m really in love with.”

Blunt is on the promotional trail for her new film The Fall Guy. This is the uncomfortable part for the actor, who is always on the red carpet best dressed lists, whether it be attending the Oscars or the Golden Globes.

The Fall Guy star Emily Blunt admits she loves a ball gown but lives “most of my life in jeans and T-shirts”. Picture: Austin Hargrave for Universal Pictures

“You’re not human on a red carpet,” she says. “It is something that is so outside of normal life and even as much as we all normalise it to this day, because it is the only way to try to Zen your way through it, because it is so abnormal, I think I probably live most of my life in jeans and T-shirts disassociating from that version of me, or maybe that version of how people might see you.

“That’s all beautiful and it is wonderful to celebrate your movie in that way, and the glamour of it is really fun. I love a ball gown. My dream would be to put on a beautiful dress and just go straight to the event, rather than do the red carpet. That level of exposure is sort of terrifying.”

Emily Blunt at last month’s SXSW premiere of The Fall Guy at The Paramount Theatre in Austin, Texas. Picture: Daniel Boczarski/Getty Images

This scribe first caught up with Blunt back in 2004 when she visited Sydney to promote her British drama flick, My Summer Of Love. She was 21 then, pegged as a star on the rise as she travelled with co-star Natalie Press. Both actors were giddy and giggly with genuine excitement to be flown all the way to Sydney as they sat down at the Intercontinental Hotel overlooking the harbour.

Two years later, Blunt was one of the hottest stars in Hollywood after her breakthrough role alongside Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway in cult film, The Devil Wears Prada.

“Oh my gosh,” she said, reminded of the trip. “It is so wild. I mean that film not only was an invitation into working in movies, but I learned so much from (director) Pawel Pawlikowski. I guess in some weird, full circle way, similar to Fall Guy, so much of My Summer Of Love was improvised and created in the moment, and that beautiful spontaneity and the aliveness that I think can really be quite kidnapping for an audience because it feels so off the cuff, so funny, so real.

“And I learnt a lot about being courageous with that, with Pawel, and it’s certainly a tool that’s carried me through other experiences. Like when I did The Devil Wears Prada, I had the confidence of coming from an improvising world and so we could throw lines in that weren’t scripted, and then in Fall Guy, Ryan loves to work in that way. David (Leitch) loves to work in that way and I love to work in that way. And so you’re able to capture a spontaneity in your movie and in your love story that people really connect to, and it’s just the most wonderful, freeing way of working.”

Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt in The Fall Guy, directed by David Leitch.

Speaking via Zoom now, Blunt is just as down to earth as she was all those years ago.

She has bounced from blockbuster to blockbuster through those past two decades with credits including Edge Of Tomorrow with Tom Cruise, A Quiet Place with her husband John Krasinski, and Jungle Cruise with Dwayne Johnson. She has been nominated and won countless awards. This year she scored her first Academy Award nomination for Oppenheimer.

“It’s so wild to me that I’ve been around the block that long and it feels like a blink, it really does,” she said.

The Fall Guy is the movie adaptation of the popular 1980s television series of the same name. It tells the story of ageing stuntman Colt Seavers, who finds himself on the run from some nasty crooks. Blunt plays film director Jody Moreno, who is making her sci-fi flick, Metal Storm.

Hannah Waddingham, Stephanie Tsu, Adam Dunn and Teresa Palmer are also in the cast, with many Australian faces popping up in smaller roles including David Collins, Tim Franklin and Andrew Ryan. Sydney, though, is almost as much of a character in the film as Blunt and Gosling, with stunt scenes shot all over town, including a car chase across the Harbour Bridge.

Ryan Gosling chats with his stunt double (white shirt) on the Harbour Bridge while filming action scenes for The Fall Guy. Picture: Gaye Gerard

The Opera House also features, as do other locations across town like the CBD light rail.

Parts of Sydney were shut down during production.

Director David Leitch spent a lot of time in Sydney working as a stuntman himself on the Matrix sequels.

“I had memories about being a stuntman there so it just felt like I could access a lot of creatively if we were in Sydney, and it made total sense to me as a filmmaker being there. The movie is about the making of a movie, so it allowed us to see a guy in a city that is not his digs but he is there running around getting into mischief,” explains Leitch, who has stunted for the likes of Brad Pitt and Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Leitch has also directed such big-name movies as Bullet Train, Deadpool 2 and Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw.

Emily Blunt, Ryan Gosling, and Stephanie Hsu at the SXSW premiere of The Fall Guy in Austin, Texas. Picture: Daniel Boczarski/Getty Images

“We didn’t want it to have a severity to it, or earnestness, or sort of too cool for school,” Blunt says of The Fall Guy. “It is not slick, none of the characters are slick, and maybe that is why you feel a part of it, that you don’t feel outside of it, too sort of ‘aren’t we cool’, which is never the way to invite an audience in.”

The hardcore stunts were reserved mostly for Gosling’s character, although Blunt wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty, so to speak.

“I didn’t have to be as stunty as Ryan, obviously, but anything that I did do, I did myself,” she says. “I love a fight scene, I’ve always loved doing them and David felt like he really liked me doing those scenes as well, so we added an extra one. That stuff is really fun for me. I didn’t have to do a crazy fall that Ryan did – I am not very good with heights either and he was really scared doing it, but he did it. He fell 12 storeys off a building and I don’t know if I would have been able to do that.”

Blunt jokes that she had never been in a fight in real life.

“I would like to imagine that I would know what to do but I don’t think I would,” she laughs. “I am sure it would be really ugly fighting.”

Emily Blunt and husband John Krasinski at the Vanity Fair Oscars Party last month. Blunt said they and their two daughters enjoyed a low-key life in Sydney when not working. Picture: Michael Tran/AFP

The actor flew under the radar when filming the movie in Sydney. She travelled with her husband and their two daughters and enjoyed a low-key life when not working.

“Sydney was so good to us and welcomed us with open arms,” she continues. “The kids adored it – they adored missing the New York winter, coming to your Australian summer. It was the best – the best food, the best restaurants, just the nicest people.”

On set, there were many laughs. So many.

“It was just this endless group of actors who just wanted to see how far they could go to make each other laugh, and so it was a joy in that way,” she says. “You’ve got all of the humour, but I think it’s a very deep movie. It’s a true love letter to stunt performers, to the stunt community, to the community of people who devote their lives to making movies, to give audiences that crackling sense of wonder in the cinema and it was made to make you guys happy, it really was. Maybe that’s what people respond to as well.

“It was joyful every day on that film set, and chaos as well, because we were sort of doing something really ambitious, and we knew the movie was ambitious and a tone that you hadn’t seen before, that you’ve got this huge spectacle of action and it’s set to the backdrop of this bonkers sci-fi-western of Metal Storm and yet juxtaposed with the naturalism and the mess of their relationship. So we were just endlessly trying to find the most unique space to carve out for this movie so that people could relate to it.”

Laughs and action aside, love is at the centre of the story. The on-screen chemistry between Blunt and Gosling’s characters was evident from the first scenes.

“For us, we just needed to make sure that you rooted for this couple, that you ached for them to be together amid all of the obstacles that they had to face,” she explains. “That they represented the messy unevenness of most of us as human beings.

“Ryan is such a brilliant actor. He is so head-spinningly funny, there were endless takes that were unusable because I was gone (laughing) and I think that is maybe what people respond to about what we did to play this couple who are sort of just rag-dolled around for most of the film.”

The Fall Guy releases in cinemas April 24