5 Things I Like About Emily Blunt in Honor of Her New Movie The Fall Guy

Emily Blunt is one of my favorite actors, and she is excellent in the excellent new movie The Fall Guy.

I don’t like movie reviews that spoil the movie, so I’ll just say that I can almost guarantee it’s a fun moviegoing experience, and I think you should take someone to the theater to see it.

Anyways, I always like when Emily Blunt is in a movie. Here are 5 reasons why:

1. Her voice

There’s a reason Emily Blunt’s voice was tapped as the successor to one of the all-time voices, Julie Andrews’ voice, for the new Mary Poppins movies. Speaking or singing, British accent or no, Emily Blunt’s voice is pleasing and expressive, and she commands it incredibly well in service of her acting. In doing research for this I learned that she is on the board of directors for the American Institute for Stuttering because of her personal experience with it, and that made me like her and her voice more.

But the thing that makes me like Emily Blunt the most is …

2. Her potatoes

Listen, I’m not trying to make a joke, the potato recipe that Emily Blunt shares with Ina Garten on The Barefoot Contessa makes some of the best potatoes on the planet (I can’t find a YouTube link to embed, but here’s a link to the recipe and a clip on Facebook).

Kelly and I make these regularly and exclusively refer to them by their full and proper name, “Emily Blunt Potatoes.”

The hot oil plus the crags from shaking the potatoes after a pre-boil gives you so many deliciously crunchy edges, and they are so good that they are now the first thing I think about when Emily Blunt comes up, one spot ahead of …

3. Sicario

Did you see Sicario? Dude, she is so good in this movie. (It’s on Amazon Prime if you’re ready for an intense thrill ride.) Emily plays a vulnerable badass, something she does very well in The Fall Guy also. It’s a unique ability, and Sicario pairs her with Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro who also possess this ability, and the three of them act the hell out of it. Throw in director Denis Villeneuve (of Dune fame most recently) and writer Taylor Sheridan (Hell or High Water for me, but maybe you preferYellowstone ), and you’ve got one fine movie.

Also, I already mentioned Mary Poppins, which shows another great quality …

4. Her range

Part of the reason that Sicario works so well is because Emily Blunt had already pulled this off in Edge of Tomorrow:

I don’t think it’s crazy that the person who plays Mary Poppins can also successfully play Full Metal Bitch Sergeant Rita Vrataski and FBI Agent Kate Macer because I think Emily Blunt makes her characters believable whether they are stuck in a time loop or working at a fashion magazine or falling in love or being scared or anything really because she brings their unique feelings and motivations to life so well.

In basketball people talk about some players as “ceiling raisers”, meaning they do special things that especially help in the playoffs and can help a team win a championship, and others as “floor raisers”, meaning they do things so consistently that you know you can rely on them to make sure you’re never that bad. I don’t think either is necessarily better—you really need both to win—and some people are one, some are neither, and some are both.

Having said that, I don’t know if this applies to acting at all, but I think Emily Blunt’s ability to be consistently good across a range of genres means I know I’m getting a solid movie every time she’s in one.

I think part of the reason that happens is …

5. Her chemistry with other actors

I am not an actor, but I did talk to one about acting stuff once.

I was talking to (badgering) my new friend Michael about the finer points of being an actor at the tail end of a rehearsal dinner at a villa in Tuscany (which I’m sure was what he wanted to do as well) and he was telling me about High Desert, an Apple TV show he had recently worked on, and how amazing it was to get to watch Patricia Arquette act up close because she was so talented and such a generous scene partner.

I asked something like, “What does it mean for someone to be better or worse as a scene partner?”

Michael graciously went on to explain a bunch of little ways that actors can help or hurt each others’ performances. Some I remember being technical, like how engaged you are and what you’re doing when the camera isn’t on you but another person is doing their lines. Some I remember being about personality, like how a person interacts with the rest of the cast and crew when the cameras aren’t rolling. And some I remember sounding magical, things that only actors notice and feel because they have learned the intricacies of their craft, and those things seemed to have a lot to do with acting in service of yourself vs. acting in service of the scene.

Michael said that Patricia Arquette was so good at these things that it was easy to see why she has had success, and I learned that being able to act really well while also making it easier for others to act really well is a much more difficult task than I previously understood.

In The Fall Guy I think this is on display over and over again. It seems to me that Emily Blunt shares so much on-screen chemistry with every person she is in a scene with as if they both know that they are going to come out of the movie looking good, and in turn the movies she is in come our pretty consistently enjoyable, and so in turn she’s an actor that I really like watching act pretty much no matter what.

Who is your favorite actor? Did you see The Fall Guy? Also, here’s some more reading for you if you also like Ryan Gosling. jed@kindandfunny.com.