Emily Blunt Eats Crow, With A Dash Of Sass

It would seem that Emily Blunt chronically suffers from foot-in-mouth syndrome.

After making an offhand joke last month about regretting her American citizenship, the British-born actress found herself eating her words again—this time over a loud ringtone that interrupted her interview with Variety’s features editor, Jenelle Riley, on Sunday at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, as part of the Hamptons International Film Festival’s “A Conversation With …” series.

“Whoever’s phone that is—get out!” she pointed to the exit as the audience laughed nervously. “No, no, I’m kidding! I’m kidding! That poor person. … Oh, no, this is going up on YouTube.”

Luckily, it appears the actor is in the clear. She must have won over the hearts of her audience as she shared a handful of facts about herself.

As a child, she suffered from a severe stutter.

“That was part of the reason I didn’t want to be an actress, because I couldn’t imagine being in a profession where I’d have to speak fluently. That would be something that would be an impossible venture,” she said.

“When I was about 12, I had a really remarkable teacher. I don’t know how he had the insight to say this, but he said, ‘Do you want to be in the class play?’ And my stutter was at its worst—I was rendered almost speechless at that point. I said …” She shook her head.

“He said, ‘Come on, I think you’d be great. I’ve seen you. You do all these silly voices with your friends, silly accents. Why don’t you just try it in a silly voice?’

“And I did—and I didn’t stutter on stage.”

She was late to the acting game, landing her first professional gig at age 18—though she shared a stage with Judi Dench.

“I feel like I got my three years at [The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art] working with her, watching her, the grace at which she went about the job,” Ms. Blunt said. “She went about it with such joy, and there was no angst or torture to it. She just wanted everyone to have a good time, and I think I adopted that very early on. I’ve continued to work from a happy place. I think I do my best work when I’m happy.

“I remember all these very famous people came to see the play because of her, and she’d always invite me for champagne,” she continued. “And it was, like, Johnny Depp was there, and I was, like, ‘Oh my God!’ It was so crazy. I was 18. It was wild.”

Her streak of big-name, big-talent co-stars didn’t stop. She shared screen time with Meryl Streep in her third feature film, “The Devil Wears Prada.”

“One of my favorite moments that’s ever happened to me in my career was, I wrapped the film, I wrapped early, and I stood outside with Stanley [Tucci] and I said, ‘Oh, I’m just finished.’ He said, ‘You should say goodbye to Meryl,’ and I said, ‘Oh, no, no, I don’t want to bother her.’ He said, ‘C’mon, you have to say goodbye to her—she’d love it, she’d love it.’ ‘No, no, no, I don’t want to.’ He went and got her from her trailer.

“And I remember seeing her across the parking lot, and she ran toward me in a big puffy black coat, and the wig was off and the makeup was off, and she went, ‘You’re so funny! I loved it!’ Like that. And I just started to cry—with relief! Because she’d barely spoken to me throughout the film. She’d been horrible to me in the film.

“Yeah, it was really cool. I cried the whole way home, I think.”

The best piece of advice she’s ever received changed the way she auditions.

“You’re sitting there in a room with girls who look very similar to you, about 20 of them. It can feel, really, like you mean nothing. Like, you’re just sort of something,” she said. “A person gave me really good advice: The best thing you can do is walk into an audition knowing that the people in the room are wanting you to be the best that you can be. They are desperately wanting to find this part. They’re not wanting you to fail. And that was really interesting. It flipped it around for me.”

It wasn’t easy keeping pace with Tom Cruise in “The Edge of Tomorrow,” especially wearing an 85-pound exosuit.

“It was grueling—really, really hard,” she said. “I’ve never been required to do that kind of training before. I trained for three months before we started shooting, and then trained every day throughout film. She had to look like that exaggerated action heroine: a very lean, ripped, lethal-looking person. It was intense. And I had to keep up with Tom Cruise. He does all his own stunts, and I didn’t want to be the wuss that didn’t do mine.”

Her latest role as an FBI agent in the film “Sicario” from director Denis Villeneuve required a bit of research that significantly shaped her character.

“I spoke to [four women in the FBI] about their lifestyle, really,” she said. “It is a job I would be absolutely useless at. I simply don’t have the courage. They told me everything, they expressed everything to me, and it made a great impact on me—especially one woman, who was quite slight and small and shy, and I loved that when she spoke, it was because she meant something, and that restraint reminded me of the character in the script. So I approached her from a slightly awkward place, rather than this gun-slinging action heroine.

“The writer, when he was trying to get financing for it, he went to a couple studios, financiers, and one in particular said, ‘If you make her a dude, I’ll make it tomorrow and I’ll up your budget.’ And walked out, thank God.”

Despite what she said about her U.S. citizenship, America still loves her.

“Not to bring up the elephant in the room, but I want to absolve you on behalf of all Americans,” an audience member said at the end of her talk, “because I saw the quote, and I couldn’t agree more with what you said. We’re lucky to have you, not you lucky to have us.”

“Oh, thank you,” she blushed, throwing her head back with laughter. “I got into trouble with ‘Fox & Friends.’”