The Girl on the Train Trailer Still - H 2016
Screengrab/Universal PicturesEmily Blunt had to get drunk and ugly for the highly anticipated thriller The Girl on the Train, the film adaptation of Paula Hawkins’ best-seller, playing divorced alcoholic Rachel Watson who becomes obsessed with a seemingly perfect couple that she sees on her daily train rides. But getting the actress to look like a hot-mess drunk took some work.
According to Blunt, who covers InStyle‘s November issue, “The prosthetic people created these molds that clipped onto my teeth to make my face seem puffy.”
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Blunt’s on-set makeup artist, Kyra Panchenko (Kill Bill, Trainwreck), helped in stripping away the 33-year-old star’s beauty, too. “She used gray eye shadow under my eyes to bring out the circles and a little brush to paint spider veins all over my face,” Blunt told the fashion glossy, adding that they would examine mug shots of drunk drivers to achieve the right look.
Depending on how drunk Blunt had to appear onscreen, she’d rotate between three colored contact lenses — pink, red and yellow — to represent that she was tipsy, drunk or hungover, respectively.
Given Blunt’s natural beauty, director Tate Taylor told InStyle that he often asked if the crew could “make her look a little more drunk and ugly?”
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Apparently there were folks who did feel Blunt was too pretty to play the lead character. But that didn’t matter to Hawkins.
“People say, ‘Oh, she’s way too beautiful to play her,'” said the author in her cover story with the actress for The Hollywood Reporter. “But that doesn’t matter. The thing about Rachel is her self-loathing, about what she feels about herself, and Emily really brought that out in the way she carries herself. All that damage is visible.”
The Girl on the Train hits theaters Friday.
