Emily Blunt opens up on how nights where she got blind drunk helped her play an alcoholic in The Girl On The Train
But discovering she was pregnant during filming meant a tipple to unwind was out of the question
HER gruelling, emotionally draining scenes as a lonely alcoholic in The Girl On The Train nearly drove Hollywood star Emily Blunt to booze.
But discovering she was pregnant during filming meant a tipple to unwind was out of the question — and when it came to the drunken scenes she had to rely on memory.
In an exclusive interview, 33-year-old Londoner Emily admits: “I’ve had a couple of blackout drunk nights in my life, yes.
“Everyone seems so shocked when I say that but give me a break. Everyone’s had a night like that, right?
“I’ve had a couple where I’m like, ‘What happened? Oh my God, what did I say?’ — where you have only the vaguest recollection of what you might have done.
“But for this movie I couldn’t touch a drop, so I had to channel memories, that felt increasingly like distant memories, of drunkenness. And then I went home and stared at my bump.
“There were a few times I would have really liked a beer after a long day.”
The film, which is released in UK cinemas on Friday, is adapted from Paula Hawkins’ 2015 best-seller of the same name.
Emily plays Rachel Watson, whose drink problem has cost her her career and her marriage, and who obsesses over a happy family she can see from the train on her daily commute — pretending she still has a job. Then events take a darker turn and she worries what she might have done during one of her booze blackouts.
Critics have said Emily, who shot to fame playing a bitchy assistant in 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada, is “too pretty” for the part of a woman falling apart and struggling with divorce and drink.
But Emily hits back: “Why don’t they watch it first before they tell me if I’m too pretty? I think I look pretty convincingly rough, but that’s just me . . .
“Playing Rachel has stretched me in ways that I haven’t been stretched before. I had to flex muscles I’ve never accessed.
“Trying to understand this addictive personality, that sense of being unable to put one foot in front of the other without relying on a drink, has been an extraordinary experience.
“I’m a really fun drunk — or so I’ve been told and like to think . . .
“Probably to everyone else they’re like, ‘Oh my God, she’s so embarrassing.
“Now if I have a drink in public I’m going to be thinking other people will be keeping an eye on me just in case it all starts to look a bit like art imitating life.
“Oh God, they’re probably going to want to see if I drew from my own experience.”
In Hollywood, the trend for actors with an eye on an Oscar is to go fully “method”, meaning they live as their character both on and off set — think Leonardo DiCaprio for The Revenant, Daniel Day Lewis for
My Left Foot and Jared Leto for Suicide Squad. Yet Emily claims that women don’t have time to “indulge” themselves in this acting technique because as wives and mothers they have far too much else to do.
She is married to The Office US star John Krasinski, 36, and they have two girls — Hazel, two, and three-month-old Violet.
Emily says, dismissively: “You don’t hear about many method women, do you? Usually we’re not given the chance.
“I was pregnant, had a toddler at home who had no care as to whether I had been able to play an alcoholic well that day.
“Women are taken advantage of and I think that is quite common in domestic life.
I’m a mother first and an actress second
“I hear about that from my friends and have had moments of experiencing that myself. But I just found ways to come in and out of the darker moments filming.
“I was very committed and focused in the scenes, but I’ve never been one of those actors who tortures myself.
“I’m a mother first, actress second but motherhood is a very strange beast. There’s huge societal pressure on mothers and double standards when it comes to fathers.
“Remember that story of the little boy who fell into the gorilla enclosure in Cincinnati Zoo? There was such hatred and vitriol towards the mother. The father was present as well when that happened.
“Yet it’s the mother’s fault, and she shouldn’t be a mother and that gorilla is obviously a better mother than her. Nobody mentioned there was a father there too.”
Emily is thrilled that The Girl On The Train is a female-fronted film with complex, often unlikeable women at the centre.
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She has often fought against a Hollywood which sees women as eye candy, pulling a nude scene from blockbuster Sicario last year because “my t*ts didn’t agree with it”.
She says: “I see a double standard because the women in the film are unlikeable, yet you see a lot of films with men in unlikeable lights and doing unlikeable, flawed things and it’s fine.
“It’s a great thing to see women presented in a flawed light and not held in some feminine idyll.
“It’s more of a rarity. Rachel is a drunk but a male character maybe going through something different would be misunderstood, a partier.
“Women are not necessarily likeable or witty or pretty or supportive.
“They are flawed. They are doing things that are wrong. They are going about things the wrong way. And that’s life and that’s a much more human portrayal of women. You don’t see it very often in cinema.”
She adds: “And I love that I look like crap in this film. I would come into work with no make-up and they’d make me look even worse. They would add facial redness and bags. I had contact lenses that covered my eyes for the really drunk stuff that gave the whites of my eyes a bloodshot effect.
“When people are drunk they look scary — there’s something in their eyes that is really crazy. And the redness. I had the most incredible make-up artist who pulled up mugshots of famous people to draw inspiration from.
“I’m so proud to be in a film that sheds light on women screwing up every day and being human and having a human experience.”
Thriller was my last roll of the dice
NOT so long ago, Paula Hawkins was single, struggling to pay the bills and living in the shadow of Brixton Prison with an ex.
Then she wrote The Girl On The Train, a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic with a copy flying off the shelves every 20 seconds – and now she is one of the world’s highest paid authors, netting £8million last year.
In the week that the Hollywood film of her bestseller is released, The Sun on Sunday can reveal that Paula has also found love.
Paula, 44, is dating personal injury lawyer Simon Davis, 57. They are old friends who went on group skiing trips over the years and became romantically involved following the release of her thriller in January 2015.
Simon was widowed more than 20 years ago and raised his daughters Judy and Megan, then aged six and four, on his own.
The girls have welcomed Paula into their dad’s life – even attending last week’s premiere of Girl On The Train and posting about it on Instagram.
When she wrote the novel, Paula was living in a Victorian terrace in Brixton, South London with her ex Jamie Wilding, 51. They had split up years before, remained friends and he was her lodger – Jamie makes it into the book’s list of personal thank-you messages.
Paula, who now has a penthouse in central London, admits the book was her “last roll of the dice” after years of failure.
Born and raised in Zimbabwe, she previously wrote romances under a pen name.
But her latest chick-lit book had flopped, previous work as a financial journalist had dried up, she was struggling to pay the mortgage and had to borrow money from her dad to buy food.
Paula said: “I was broke. It was very stressful, so I was in a bit of a panic.
“It was really terrible, I felt awful about it. You really don’t need your children borrowing from you at that point in life.”
“I didn’t have a partner so I paid the mortgage by myself and I was thinking, ‘Oh God, I’m going to have to sell the house, or find a new career’. This was the last roll of the dice.
“I was not in a good place but it was a real spur to get the book right. I had to nail it and do it really well. It really concentrates the mind, that kind of thing.
“For the six months I was writing it, I didn’t really do anything else.”
Paula added: “We’ve sold a lot of books. We were optimistic that it was going to do well, but nothing on this scale. It’s really quite extraordinary.
“The financial security has been lovely, but apart from that nothing has changed.”
In fact, Paula has shunned the spotlight.
A source told us: “Simon is 13 years older than her. He’s a lawyer, very stable and calm.
“Paula is finding her new-found fame hard, so perhaps he’s a bit of a father figure for her."