Emily Blunt reveals how a stutter helped her become an actress

As the sharp-tongued fashion magazine assistant in the hit film The Devil Wears Prada, she was never short of a withering comment – but actress Emily Blunt, today tells how her childhood was marred by a stutter.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday's You magazine, Emily, 38, says: 'Stutterers are some of the most courageous people because it's such a minefield every time you open your mouth.'

Yet her stutter helped her to become an actress. 

'One of the ways I could speak normally was if I did a silly voice or an accent. 

'It actually gave me a fluency I wasn't otherwise capable of,' she says. 

'It was the making of me, in many ways.'

Her portrayal of Emily Charlton in The Devil Wears Prada in 2006 catapulted her to fame. She has since starred in more than 40 films.

EMILY BLUNT: 'I really didn't want to be an actress

By Jo Elvin for You Magazine 

But fate – and a high-school teacher – had other ideas for Emily Blunt. Jo Elvin discovers how the painfully shy schoolgirl with a debilitating stutter became one of the most celebrated actresses of her generation 

Hollywood superstars are often at pains to let you know how down to earth they are. But during the course of my chat with Emily Blunt, I accidentally stumbled across the ultimate test of just that.

Picture the scene: the British actress has arrived in Spain just an hour earlier and is Zooming me from her hotel room. I’m in my London home. We’re happily chatting away – and we’ll cover a lot of ground, from her stellar career to her superstar marriage – when something mortifying happens at my end.

I hadn’t seen my dog walk into the room, but suddenly we both hear her. Throwing up.

‘Oh god, I can hear it, that’s gross,’ says Emily, covering her face in her hands, shoulders shaking with laughter.

I’m mortified. But Emily shrugs, ‘I have a dog. Who vomits a lot. If you need to go and clean it up, I can wait.’

So I ask her to make me feel better by telling me an embarrassing story and what she comes out with is a profound insight into the woman she’s become. ‘I was ten years old, it was Christmas, and everyone at school was dressed as festive characters,’ she says, between sips of water from a gigantic bottle. ‘I’d hurt my knee so at the time I was on crutches and my mother said, “Well, why don’t you go as Tiny Tim from A Christmas Carol?” I had the peasant cap, the lot. And in front of the whole school, a teacher asked me who I’d come as and I was stuttering – Ts were especially challenging for me – and I just couldn’t say it. It was awful. I remember just saying to her, “Guess, guess” because I couldn’t say it. It seemed to go on for an eternity.

‘A stutter is such a dreadful imposter in your body,’ she adds. ‘It misrepresents who you are completely, so that’s all people see. Because people sound funny, they look funny when they talk and it’s very readily bullied and made fun of. And misinterpreted. People don’t get that it’s a biological disability that’s usually hereditary.’

It’s incredible to think how life actually turned out for this terrified Tiny Tim; the traumatised seven-year-old stutterer who became one of the most celebrated actresses of her generation. She now campaigns for the American Institute for Stuttering, and as such has been known to turn up on the doorsteps of young stutterers to offer them advice and encouragement. For Emily, it was a high-school teacher who changed everything by encouraging her to try acting as a way of managing her stutter.

‘I found that one of the ways I could speak normally back then was if I did a silly voice or an accent,’ she says.

It’s a story that sounds like the plot of a film: the stuttering child saved by acting, but even though her raw talent shone through early on, Emily herself was the one person who doubted it. ‘I know that’s a good soundbite, but I really didn’t want to be an actress,’ she says. ‘I had a deliberate resistance to it because I couldn’t imagine doing a job where you had to speak all the time. I thought I wanted to be a linguist, maybe a translator for the UN. My mum’s a great linguist – I was really inspired by that. So even when I realised that when I acted, it actually gave me a fluency I wasn’t otherwise capable of, I don’t remember it being this “aha!” moment of, “Right, OK, this is what I was born to do.”’

For someone who didn’t really see acting as her destiny, she’s doing OK. A veteran of some 40 films as well as television and stage credits, her career is a tick-tick-tick list of box-office hits, awards and glowing reviews. She can serve you bullet-dodging action (Edge of Tomorrow) or frazzled alcoholism (The Girl on the Train). She can have you in stitches with an elegantly arched eyebrow (The Devil Wears Prada) or singing along in a traditional knees-up (Mary Poppins Returns). There’ll be no typecasting Ms Blunt thanks to her remarkable versatility, which she now realises was a talent she unwittingly honed as a kid.

‘It [the stutter] was the making of me in many ways,’ she nods. ‘You learn great empathy and to watch people very closely, because often you can’t speak. So you observe everything. You read every nuance of every person you’re talking to – mainly to see if they’re going to make fun of you or understand you. I think it maybe made me more empathetic and observant. I love mimicking people. I love putting an essence of someone I know into a part I’m playing. So whether it’s an abstract or an acute awareness, I think it has made a difference to how I choose to play people.’

Just to ram the versatility point home, Emily is spearheading the return to cinemas this summer with two films that couldn’t be more different. First there was A Quiet Place Part II, the sequel to the 2018 instant classic she starred in with her director husband John Krasinski (more on him soon). This time, her partner in dodging terrifying aliens with supernatural hearing is Cillian Murphy of Peaky Blinders fame. Then there’s the film we are here to discuss today – Jungle Cruise, inspired by the popular river ride at Disneyland.

Emily calls it ‘a joy bomb of a film’ – an adventure comedy that channels the spirit of Indiana Jones and The African Queen. Jack Whitehall plays her brother and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is their dodgy riverboat captain.

The trio formed a tight bond, and Emily feels sorry for the director who often had to scold them into stopping mucking about. ‘Jack and I liked sending Dwayne videos of ourselves on set doing stunts, pretending that we were helping him learn how to do an action sequence,’ she says about the veteran of many action films who is renowned for doing his own stunts. ‘We’d send these really patronising videos of us being like, “OK, Dwayne, this is called… a stunt sequence.” Jack’s name for me was “Stunty Blunty”. He was “Jacktion Man”. Our preparations for stunts involved eating a fried chicken takeaway. Every time we had an action sequence, that’s what we’d eat. So we’d send Dwayne videos saying, “You don’t need to go to the gym so much, you actually just need to eat fried chicken.”’

Emily leapt at the chance to do this rather old-fashioned romp because ‘it was just so emblematic of the kinds of films I worshipped as a kid, like Indiana Jones, Romancing the Stone, The African Queen. I mainlined them into my body. Here was exactly the kind of film I want to watch.’

Such movies were a Friday-night staple for the Blunt family. Wandsworth-born Emily is one of four children born to mum Joanna, a former actress and teacher, and dad Oliver, a barrister.

‘But do you think kids have gone a bit soft?’ she asks. ‘Because I think I was watching Pretty Woman when I was ten! I actually have this lasting memory

read more from dailymail.....