BEVERLY HILLS – To say 2018 is turning out to be a momentous year for Emily Blunt is something of an understatement. “A Quiet Place,” a film her husband John Krasinski directed and co-starred alongside her in, was an unexpected critical and box office hit this past spring taking in $340 million worldwide. She’ll follow that up with an already celebrated turn as Mary Poppins in Rob Marshall’s “Mary Poppins Returns.” A performance so impressive she somehow makes you forget Julie Andrews‘ Oscar-winning turn from the original 1964 classic.
This new iteration of “Mary Poppins” is inspired by the original novels by P.L. Travers and takes place in the 1930s, a good 25 years after the original movie. The Banks children, Michael and Jane (Ben Whishaw and Emily Mortimer), are all grown up and the widowed Michael has three young kids to now raise on his own. With the assistance of lamplighter Jack (Lin-Manuel Miranda), Mary Poppins (Blunt) helps the family navigate some truly troubling times. They also take the kids on some musical adventures that find them underwater, interacting with animated characters and even singing and dancing with Meryl Streep (well, her character Topsy at least).
On Monday both “Mary Poppins Returns” and “A Quiet Place” made the list of top 10 films of the year announced by the National Board of Review and that was where our in-person conversation started.
Please note: There is a very minor spoiler in the context of this interview, but if you’ve seen the latest trailer it’s not a spoiler.
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The Playlist: Congratulations on yesterday. What was it like in the Blunt-Krasinski household to see…
Emily Blunt: In the “Krunt” household as we like to be known as just so you know. We call it the “Krunt House.”
Both your films, “Mary Poppins Returns” and “A Quiet Place,” made the top ten from NBR.
It was so wild. We had a bit of a cry about it because it is so surreal and so completely gratifying and beautiful and unexpected.
And I also saw a story that just ran that said that when John saw this movie did he really cry?
Oh, he’s a cryer, yeah, yeah.
Were you sitting next to him while he saw it?
Yes, yes, yes.
Did you expect this to happen?
Yes, but not to the extent that it did. I mean, he pretty much went through a box of tissues 20 minutes into “Mary Poppins” and even turned to me and he went, “What’s happening to me?” He was like, “What’s wrong with me?” And I remember when Dick Van Dyke appears, he just went like this, he went, “Oh my god!” Like that. He just openly exclaimed, “Oh my god!” It was really beautiful seeing him respond like that because he’s not a musical fan.
Oh really?
No, no. But he just said, “The joy bomb on my soul right now is just hitting me on every cylinder.”
Well, I have to say, I know so many people who have seen the movie, and they’re just bawling at the end.
Bawling! I think I’ve been surprised by the sort of scream-crying that comes at me after they’ve seen the film. It’s just so beautiful. And Rob and I were saying, it is a different energy that comes at you after people see this film of not realizing that they needed such joy in their lives. And not realizing how much they needed her to come back until they see her come out of the clouds.
I spoke to Rob last week and he told me he wasn’t going to make this movie unless you were going to play Mary Poppins. How did he approach you about that, and when he did, was your response, “Hey, give me 24 hours? Give me a week?”
No. Immediate, “Yes.”
Really?
Come on!
There was no hesitation?
It’s Mary Poppins! But it’s funny because I mean there was such a sense of ceremony to the phone call in the first place. I mean, it had such a charged energy to it when he called me that I knew something major was coming down the pike. But when he said Mary Poppins, I remember being really stunned. It was like my hair blew back or something. I just, I didn’t know what he was going to say. He was like, “We’ve been looking through Disney’s archives and their most prized possession,” and it was like, “What? What is it?” And when he said “Mary Poppins,” it was like the air changed in the room. And I do remember feeling instantaneous these sort of duel emotions of “I’m doing it” and “I’m terrified.”
When he called you, had they already written the screenplay or were they about to?
They were just breaking the story on it. So, he gave me the outline of the story that they wanted to do to embark on this next chapter and they hadn’t written any of the songs, but there was a pretty clear story. When he pitched me, it was very much about how she comes back for Michael, and it’s the Great Depression, which is when the books were set. I knew this more profound backdrop, this backdrop of great depth and need for her to come back. Like, why do we need her to come back? You’ve got to create an environment where she has to come back. And also, to make it nostalgically still about the Banks family I thought was a beautiful way to do it. He had a very clear idea thematically on that rediscovery of childlike wonder that he wanted in Michael and Jane, but also in Michael, who’s experienced great loss, as have the children. And intentionally, P.L. Travers set the books during the slump, where you really need hope to reappear from the skies.
Which makes it very sort of contemporary in some ways.
Very contemporary, yeah.
Disney live action movies seem to have very long production timelines. The idea that you’d be brought on before the script was even finished means you had a lot of prep time. Did that help just knowing, “O.K., I’m doing this a year from now?”
Well, all in all, the whole process, Mary Poppins was sort of in my life for close to two years by the time I was done.
Have you ever had that much prep time for a role?
Never. I mean, he approached me about it August 2015. We didn’t even start rehearsing until October 2016. And I had effectively a whole year to prep the character. I was having my second baby, so I was heavily pregnant for a lot of the prep time. So I’d go and see [composer] Marc Shaiman and [lyricst] Scott Wittman in New York where we all live and I’d go in and out here, and be sort of singing these songs, and we’d workshop this music. So, the songs were just like tailor-made suits for Lin and I by the end. They were written for us and to our strengths. And Rob and I had so many conversations about the character and so collaborative. All my ideas that I was having from reading the books he would put into the script. It was just this slow burn of understanding who this bizarre, magical woman was, how I wanted to play her and the songs were completely in our bones by the time we even started rehearsals. We had nine weeks of rehearsals.
