Emily Blunt Is Bored With “Strong Female Lead” Roles: “That Makes Me Roll My Eyes”

Emily Blunt is one of the most respected actresses in the world. She’s also a performer who isn’t satisfied doing the same roles over and over. She’ll go from horror (“A Quiet Place”) to action-adventure (“Jungle Cruise”) to sci-fi (“Edge of Tomorrow”). And now, she’s in the new Western, “The English.” But one thing Blunt apparently isn’t looking for in a script is a “strong female lead.”

In a recent interview with The Telegraph, Emily Blunt talked about her new project, the Western series “The English.” And in discussing her character, she opened up about one of her pet peeves with many scripts nowadays—the strong female lead.

READ MORE: ‘The English’ Review: Emily Blunt & Chaske Spencer Are Mesmerizing In A Gripping Western

“I love a character with a secret,” explained Blunt. “And I loved Cornelia’s buoyancy, her hopefulness, her guilelessness. It’s the worst thing ever when you open a script and read the words: ‘strong female lead.’ That makes me roll my eyes – I’m already out. I’m bored. Those roles are written as incredibly stoic, you spend the whole time acting tough and saying tough things. Cornelia is more surprising than that. She’s innocent without being naive, and that makes her a force to be reckoned with. She startles Eli out of his silence, and their differences become irrelevant because they need each other to survive. I thought that was very cool.”

It would be silly to think that Blunt is anti-strong-female character in films. However, it’s clear the actress has no interest in playing a one-note role where the character has no flaws, and the most obvious character trait is her toughness. And if you look at her roles over the past several years, even when she does play a “strong female lead,” such as in “Sicario,” the role is peppered with so much more drama and intrigue that the character is far more than a capable badass. 

You can watch Emily Blunt play the complicated character Cornelia in “The English,” which is on Prime Video now (read our review here).