Oppenheimer star says she is ‘appalled’ by her remarks in 2012 interview with Jonathan Ross
Emily Blunt has apologised for referring to a restaurant worker as “enormous” on a chatshow that aired 11 years ago.
In a resurfaced clip from an episode of the Jonathan Ross Show first broadcast on ITV in September 2012, the star of the summer blockbuster Oppenheimer said a waitress who served her at a Chili’s restaurant in Louisiana was “enormous”.
Continue reading...Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson are romancing riverboat adventurers in a ride-turned-film that quickly becomes bland
The Jungle Cruise theme-park ride is a riverboat trip that Disneyland visitors have been queuing up for since the 1950s: an old-timey craft travelling down an artificial jungle river, with a jolly captain pointing out animatronic animals lurching out of the artificial undergrowth. Now it’s been adapted into a blandly inoffensive piece of generic entertainment: screenwriters Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (who once gave us Bad Santa and I Love You Phillip Morris) have mashed up The African Queen with Raiders of the Lost Ark, and with what I admit is a surreal splash of Aguirre, Wrath of God.
It’s lively enough for the first 20 minutes. The year is 1916, and Emily Blunt plays Lily Houghton, a haughty yet idealistic British scientist, much patronised by the male establishment in London. She imperiously hires a riverboat in Brazil to find the much-rumoured “Tree of Life” somewhere in the jungle. Its captain is a cynical-with-a-heart-of-gold rogue called Frank Wolff, man-mountainishly played by Dwayne Johnson. After the traditional meet-cute, their growing romance plays off the comedy turn provided by Jack Whitehall, playing the other passenger: Lily’s foppish, neurotic younger brother MacGregor. At one stage, Whitehall’s prissy, wussy Englishman explains to Dwayne Johnson that he is gay – or rather, he says something indirect about being not as other men, and the subject is never raised again, Edwardian reticence dovetailing nicely with Disney family values. It is a stereotype that Walt himself might have recognised, while also approving of the obvious heterosexuality of Frank with his muscles, boots and sailor’s cap.
Continue reading...With her latest movie, Jungle Cruise, out this month, we round up the finest work by the star of The Devil Wears Prada and A Quiet Place Part II
Emily Blunt can make bad films tolerable. Even her talents were stretched, though, by this horror reboot. She lounges demurely on a riverbank in funeral dress while Benicio del Toro grunts and growls and Anthony Hopkins goes full ham. The original director, Mark Romanek, jumped ship to be replaced by Joe Johnston. The result is a wolf’s dinner.
Continue reading...Now postponed because of coronavirus, A Quiet Place 2 explores a world untethered by fear. Its star discusses parenthood, in film and real life, and her terror of doing SNL
Emily Blunt and her husband, John Krasinski, devised a rigorous self-care regime when the pair were making A Quiet Place, 2017’s harrowing self-isolation horror hit. “I always say that Macallan 12 sponsored A Quiet Place,” says Blunt. “John and I would just go home and drink a lot of whisky every night. And that sort of continued on A Quiet Place 2.”
You, too, might need a tumbler of scotch while watching the film. Blunt describes it as a “runaway train that grips you by the neck”, which is half-right. It also takes that neck and lays it on the tracks before running over it repeatedly. “I realised what an investment people had in this family from the first film,” says Blunt. “Everyone asked: ‘What happens next?’”
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