Emily Blunt made “Devil Wears Prada” fans happy when she recently reprised her role in the cult hit. However, the actress revealed in a recent interview that acting wasn’t her first choice of vocation.
“Before I was going to be an actress, I wanted to work for the U.N. and be a Spanish translator,” she told BBC Radio 2. “I’ve always loved languages. My mother is an incredible linguist, so I think I grew up being quite inspired by her.”
During the interview, she explained the origins of her love of words.
“I’ve always loved languages,” Blunt said. “My mother is an incredible linguist, so I think I grew up being quite inspired by her.”
When she revealed her first choice of career, she turned to Steven Spielberg who was sitting next to her and hilariously said: “Isn’t that insane?”
“I’m glad you didn’t take that job,” Spielberg quipped.
“Me too,” Blunt responded.
The interview was in promotion of her starring role in the director’s latest movie “Disclosure Day,” which also stars Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Colman Domingo, and Eve Hewson.
The sci-fi film features Blunt as a Kansas City TV meteorologist who unexpectedly develops superhuman abilities after encountering an extraterrestrial force. In the film, she speaks Russian and Korean — however she has said in a previous interview she knows one other language.
Along with those two, her character also speaks in an extraterrestrial tongue which involves clicking noises. Spielberg offered to have AI generate the language, however Blunt recently told Entertainment Tonight that she insisted that she create the language.
“He said, ‘You know, we could do it with AI, or you could do it,'” Blunt said. “And I was like, ‘I feel confident I can make some weird noises.'”
What exactly do they sound like? Blunt had a hilarious way of explaining them.
“Clicking, humming, doing weird Barry White sort of low singing mixed with clicking with Morse code sounds,” Blunt said. “I just tried everything. We sort of threw the kitchen sink at it, and I think he wanted it to sound mathematical and not too terrifying.”
“I was studying Spanish as one of my A levels, and then I was going to go and do a year in South America, and then by that point I was going to be fluent, and I was going to be the best translator ever,” she told Howard Stern in 2024.
She ended up pursuing acting on seemingly a whim, she said on the radio show. But the man who served as the head of drama at her school enlisted her for a “bizarre” rock opera during the summer of 2000 at the Edinburgh Theater Festival.
“He took me on and said, ‘Do you want to do this? Is this something you want to do?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I hadn’t really thought about it as a career,’” Blunt explained.
Since then she’s done pretty well, having starred in over 40 movies, including “My Summer of Love,” “Loooper,” and “Oppenheimer.”
