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One of the reasons celebrities tend to hook up with each other is that they understand the pressures of fame and the attention that comes with it. But it also has other benefits, like if you’re a Hollywood actor and you’re married to a director, you can basically blackmail them into making films, like Emily Blunt once did.
The British actor is undoubtedly one of our more successful exports over the last 15 years or so, her films have made around $5billion at the box office in total and that’s only going to be boosted by the fact she is in The Devil Wears Prada 2 this year, which appears to have been seen by every woman on the planet, plus she has the lead in one of the most awaited blockbusters in a long time.
That would be Steven Spielberg’s return to sci-fi, Disclosure Day, which hits cinemas on June 12th and about which details are deliberately very sketchy indeed so as not to give the game away. During filming, Spielberg would make sure that scripts were delivered to the set by motorbike and then immediately taken away again to prevent leaks, and actors signed iron-clad NDAs once filming had finished. Even the marketing for the movie doesn’t tell you much, focusing mainly on Blunt’s weather presenter character suddenly forgetting how to talk live on air and instead making some weird clicking sounds.
It shows the level that Blunt has reached that she’s seen by one of the greatest directors in history as a pair of hands safe enough to lead his first alien sci-fi since 2005’s War of the Worlds, but then she is a properly massive film star, an Academy Award nominated Golden Globe winner with movies under her belt like Christopher Nolan’s nuclear epic Oppenheimer in 2023 for which she won a Screen Actors Guild Award.
The first time she picked that particular honour up was for 2018’s inventive horror A Quiet Place, the silent post-apocalyptic nail-biter that came from nowhere to become one of the most talked about genre films in recent memory, made on a budget of less than $20million and bringing in $340m at the box office.
It was the film directed by Blunt’s husband, The Office’s John Krasinski, and he co-starred with her in the tale of a family living in fear from unseen monsters who react to the slightest sound, the film opening with their youngest being snatched by one of the killers. The success of the movie naturally meant that demand for a sequel was high, but it wasn’t something Blunt was initially interested in.
She told the LA Times, “I don’t believe that everything should be sequel-ised. I think that was why we had our heels dug in at the idea of one; we just weren’t entertaining the thought of it”.
Equally, Krasinski hadn’t decided whether or not to return to the franchise to direct a follow-up, but Blunt talked him round, adding, “I just said, ‘If you don’t direct it, I’m not going to do it’. So then he had to do it. That’s where it helps being the wifey.”
A Quiet Place Part II duly arrived in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic, but that didn’t stop it from almost equalling the success of the original, albeit on a significantly increased production spend. A spin-off prequel, A Quiet Place: Day One starring Lupita N’Yongo came out in 2024, and now Blunt and Krasinski are teaming up once again to make a fourth movie in the series, along with fellow post-apocalyptic stars Cillian Murphy and Jack O’Connell.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source faroutmagazine.co.uk ’
