Ella Taylor checks in with Emily Blunt, the twenty-six-year-old English actress who's covered a remarkable stretch of ground since her attention-getting performance as a seductive, callous rich girl who draws a lonely, working-class girl (Natalie Press) into her silken web in 2004's My Summer of Love. As Taylor points out, those with an aversion to stories of star-crossed adolescent lesbian attachments--they probably hate raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, too--had to wait to discover Blunt when her "tightly wound turn as Meryl Streep’s groveling girl Friday all but stole The Devil Wears Prada from Anne Hathaway." (In this sentence, "all but stole" is apparently a nice way of saying, "Oh, was Anne Hathaway in that movie too?") Taylor applauds the actress for her "taste for the offbeat and a fetching lack of vanity when it comes to playing disagreeable women", though Blunt may just have figured out early that, if you start out with looks and charisma, people already want to watch you, and playing someone disagreeable in an offbeat project is likelier to provide them with a reason than reclining in fluff and cooing to show how nice you are. (Her co-star Anne Hathaway may not have figured that out until Jonathan Demme dropped the script for Rachel Getting Married in her lap.)
Blunt will next be seen co-starring with Amy Adams in Sunshine Cleaning. She describes her character there as "hopeless, like a bull in a china shop. She has great potential, but she’s stuck, despite yearning for more than her situation. She wants to know what happened in the past, and no one wants to talk about it. She’s funny and heartbreaking, and I love her curiosity. I’m always drawn to people who are a little off the wall.” The movie, which is about sisters who start a business cleaning up crime scenes, also gives her and Amy Adams the chance to suit up in anti-fumigation outfits that make them look like “a couple of blue condoms.” In her next scheduled releases, she faces such scary challenges as John Malkovich as a magician with a stalled career (in The Great Buck Howard, in which she plays his agent), and the fall release The Wolf Man, in which she plays the love interest of a lycanthropic Benecio Del Toro, if that's not redundant. "“Acting became something I grew accustomed to doing rather than something I’d always desired," says Blunt, who brings to the screen an awesome degree of poise for someone who basically made the leap from school plays to professional acting and bypassed formal training. She told Taylor that, instead, she relies on mannerisms she's copied from people she's met: “I’m combining, so it’s not stealing, it’s research."
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