You might know Emily Blunt as the actress who is starring in The Girl on the Train and the live-action Mary Poppins movie. But at one point, people had a different career in mind for her.
Blunt told The Sydney Morning Herald that at 18, she signed a recording deal and cut a demo. "But then, I got terrified and pulled out, because I felt they were wanting me to be like Britney Spears," she said. "And I was like, 'I can't dance, and I don't sing like Britney Spears.' I just felt it was snowballing too fast and it wasn't ultimately what I wanted to do."
AdvertisementADVERTISEMENT
Into the Woods showed that Blunt is a great singer, but we wouldn't have imagined her as a pop star. And she doesn't think of herself that way, either.
The demo, she said, "Was a pop song and it seems so unlike me now. It's like a different person."
Around the same time, she found an acting agent. She seems happy to have gone down that path, instead — and is especially excited about her starring role in The Girl on the Train.
"I loved the twist in this one, that your main character is a black-out drunk," she said. "That was a huge draw for me."
"Usually, female roles are held in a feminine ideal of some sort, they're required to be perfect and pretty and appealing and 'likeable,' which is my least favourite word in the industry right now," she elaborated. "I loved that you have three very damaged women in this film and your heroine is somebody that people don't want to breathe the same air as...I hope she's very different from me. I've never played somebody who feels so alien to who I am."
This time, we think she means "different" in a good way.