Emily Blunt says she’s “bored” of the “strong female lead”
"Those roles are written as incredibly stoic," she says
The clever trick in Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario is that Emily Blunt’s character is presented as the standard hero-type who is there to help bring down a Mexican drug cartel, when in reality she’s just a tool to make it seem like some covert CIA black ops shit is more legal than it actually is—undercutting both the idea of America’s ever-noble attempts to police the world and the trope of the unimpeachable, super-capable woman in an action movie who nevertheless doesn’t really get to do anything cool or important (Blunt’s character is pretty much explicitly told that that’s why she exists). But if Sicario didn’t make it clear enough, Emily Blunt has now directly explained that she’s “bored” of seeing a script that describes a character as a “strong female lead.”
Speaking with The Telegraph, Blunt said that “those roles are written as incredibly stoic, you spend the whole time acting tough and saying tough things,” and so she says “it’s the worst thing ever” when it shows up in a script. “That makes me roll my eyes,” she says. “I’m already out. I’m bored.”
One could argue that she’s basically describing her character in Edge Of Tomorrow (or is it Live Die Repeat?) there, but she didn’t specifically call out the movie in the interview so maybe that’s not fair. Either way, Blunt says that her character in Prime Video’s The English, Cornelia, is the kind of part she likes to play these days, saying, “I love a character with a secret, and I loved Cornelia’s buoyancy, her hopefulness, her guilelessness… Cornelia is more surprising than that. She’s innocent without being naive and that makes her a force to be reckoned with.”
If you’d like to see how that goes, The English debuted on Prime Video on November 11.