Emily Blunt
Emily Blunt is an actor, born 1983.
Blunt came out of British television rather than film school. She was on a London stage by 2001, played Catherine Howard in the miniseries Henry VIII in 2003, and made her feature debut in the small English drama My Summer of Love in 2004. Two years later she had both a Golden Globe for the television film Gideon's Daughter and a scene-stealing part as the exhausted senior assistant in The Devil Wears Prada, which is still the performance most people meet her through.
What she does better than almost anyone is play competence under pressure without softening it. Her Rita in Edge of Tomorrow is a soldier with no interest in reassuring the man beside her. Kate Macer in Sicario spends the film being lied to by professionals and never quite lets it go. Even the comedy runs on precision: the Prada assistant is funny because the contempt is delivered under her breath, never performed.
The 2010s turned her into a lead who could carry very different budgets: a young Victorian queen, a musical baker's wife, a mother holding a family together in near silence in A Quiet Place, and Mary Poppins, which is a genuinely difficult act of replacement. Oppenheimer put her back in support as Kitty, and she made a largely reactive role land on two or three lines. She has been an Academy Award and BAFTA nominee, has won two Screen Actors Guild Awards and a Saturn Award, and Forbes listed her among the highest paid actresses in the world in 2020.
Movies (49)
- Disclosure Day (2026)
- The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
- The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026)
- Oppenheimer (2023)
- A Quiet Place (2018)
- Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
- Looper (2012)
- Sicario (2015)
- A Quiet Place Part II (2021)
- The Fall Guy (2024)
- IF (2024)
- Jungle Cruise (2021)
- My Little Pony: The Movie (2017)
- The Huntsman: Winter's War (2016)
- Gnomeo & Juliet (2011)
- The Girl on the Train (2016)
- The Adjustment Bureau (2011)
- The Wolfman (2010)
- The Smashing Machine (2025)
- Mary Poppins Returns (2018)
- The Muppets (2011)
- Pain Hustlers (2023)
- Into the Woods (2014)
- Gulliver's Travels (2010)
- Sherlock Gnomes (2018)
- The Five-Year Engagement (2012)
- Wild Mountain Thyme (2020)
- Wind Chill (2007)
- Dan in Real Life (2007)
- The Young Victoria (2009)
TV (18)
- The Graham Norton Show (2007)
- Agatha Christie's Poirot (1989)
- Jimmy Kimmel Live! (2003)
- Variety Studio: Actors on Actors (2014)
- The Jonathan Ross Show (2011)
- Lip Sync Battle (2015)
- Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (2009)
- The Jay Leno Show (2009)
- Made in Hollywood (2005)
- The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien (2009)
- The English (2022)
- Some Good News (2020)
- Extra (1994)
- The Actor Awards Presented by SAG-AFTRA (1995)
- Empire (2005)
- Be My Guest with Ina Garten (2022)
- Critics Choice Awards (2001)
- Henry VIII (2003)
Where to start with Emily Blunt
Start with The Devil Wears Prada, not for her best work but for the clearest look at her timing: she gets a fraction of the screen time and wins the film. Then jump to Sicario, where the same watchfulness is turned on something ugly and she plays an FBI agent slowly realising she is the least informed person in every room.
For the action side, Edge of Tomorrow is the one to see; she is the competent half of that partnership and the film knows it. A Quiet Place is the best use of her physical stillness. If you want the range, Into the Woods and Mary Poppins Returns show she can sing without the film apologising for it, and Oppenheimer proves she can do more with one courtroom scene than most leads manage with an hour.
The dramatic work
Sicario is the best thing she has done, and the film is constructed almost entirely around her point of view, which is why its last act lands the way it does. Oppenheimer brought the Academy Award nomination.
The action and science fiction
Edge of Tomorrow is the most enjoyable action film of the last fifteen years and she is the reason, playing the competent one to Tom Cruise's coward. The Quiet Place films are the horror, and she is extraordinary in the first.
The musicals and family films
Blunt trained in none of this and sings genuinely well, which is why Into the Woods and Mary Poppins Returns work at all. Jungle Cruise is the theme-park one, and IF is the recent family film.
The comedies and early work
The comedy career, which started the whole thing. The Devil Wears Prada gives her about fifteen minutes and she steals the film from two leads, and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is the underseen romantic one.