Want to know what makes Emily Blunt cringe?
“Normally, the character is summed up in the first line,” the actress tells The Hollywood Reporter of the many scripts that float her way. “‘She’s a tough, sassy, English rose,’ and you’re like, ‘Oh cringe. That’s all you need to know.’ I normally will close the script after I read that.”
But with Arthur Newman, Becky Johnston‘s identity-swapping dramedy, Blunt found herself thumbing through the script multiple times before grasping the background on her character, Mike (short for McKayla). In the film, Colin Firth plays a lost, middle-aged man who fakes his own death to assume a new identity. On his way to a new town, he comes across Blunt’s character, who is running from a past of her own.
Blunt says after reading the script three times, and bouncing back and forth between whether her character was “crazy” or “not crazy,” she ultimately decided that “she was not crazy but was in a constant state of anxiety that she would become crazy.”
“It was a joy that I had so many questions about the script,” she says. “With this character, I couldn’t get a handle on her.”
The film, out April 26 via Cinedigm, is director Dante Ariola‘s feature debut.
“We were all on new territory together,” Firth tells THR. “It actually proved to be quite a dynamic combination.”
THR also asked the actors who they’d most like to swap identities with in real life — and Blunt’s answer may surprise. See the video below for more.
