Emily Blunt is tired of playing “strong female leads.” Blunt told The Telegraph (via IndieWire) that she is quickly bored when she reads “strong female lead” as a character description in screenplays and calls the stereotype “the worst thing ever.”
Blunt told the site that if she sees that kind of character description in a possible movie, she is just not interested.
“It’s the worst thing ever when you open a script and read the words ‘strong female lead,'” Blunt said. “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.”
Blunt noted that her role in The English, Cornelia, piqued her interest right away. Blunt stated that she like characters that have a secret, and Cornelia certainly met the bill.
“I love a character with a secret,” Blunt said. “And I loved Cornelia’s buoyancy, her hopefulness, her guilelessness… 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 cool.”
