Emily Blunt has revealed that she will automatically turn down a role if she sees three specific words in a script.
The British-born actress has an impressive catalog, having starred in well-known films like Oppenheimer, A Quiet Place, Mary Poppins, and The Girl on the Train.
After having climbed the Hollywood ladder to take these main roles, the 40-year-old star - who has earned several nominations for various roles - can afford to be a little choosy.
In an interview with The Telegraph last year to promote her TV show, The English, Blunt shared that there are three specific words that serve as a bit of a red flag when it comes to selecting her next project.
Watch The English trailer below:Written and directed by multi-award-winning Hugo Blick (The Honourable Woman, Black Earth Rising, The Shadow Line), The English follows Lady Cornelia Locke, a woman who plans to avenge her late son in 1980s mid-America.
She runs into an indigenous farmer named Eli Whipp (played by Chaske Spencer), who is an ex-American army officer on a mission of revenge in order to reclaim his land.
Speaking about her latest character, the Devil Wears Prada star told the publication: "I love a character with a secret. And I loved Cornelia’s buoyancy, her hopefulness, her guilelessness."
Blunt then admitted "It’s the worst thing ever when you open a script and read the words 'strong female lead.' That makes me roll my eyes - I’m already out. I’m bored."
The mom-of-two believes that characters attributed to her disliked phrase are expected to have almost no expression. "Those roles are written as incredibly stoic, you spend the whole time acting tough and saying tough things," she explained.
Blunt decided to go for the role in the Western revenge series after seeing she could portray someone who had much more intricate emotions.
"Cornelia is more surprising than that. She’s innocent without being naive and that makes her a force to be reckoned with," she shared. "She startles Eli out of his silence and their differences become irrelevant because they need each other to survive. I thought that was very cool."
Blunt isn't the first actress to speak out against the "strong female lead" label.
Actress Tatiana Maslany - who starred in the Disney+ Marvel series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law - told The Guardian last August that it’s "frustrating" for roles to be diminished to that one "strong" quality.
"It’s reductive," the 38-year-old argued. "It’s just as much a shaving off of all the nuances and just as much of a trope. It’s a box that nobody fits into. Even the phrase is frustrating. It’s as if we’re supposed to be grateful that we get to be that."
Maslany spoke about her decision to join She-Hulk - in which she stars as Bruce Banner's (Mark Ruffalo) cousin Jennifer Walters - and explained that it wasn’t her character's strength that attracted her.
"What drew me to the role is how human and how unheroic she is, and how little interest she has in pursuing all that," she said. "What made me go, 'Oh, OK, this feels fresh and surprising,' is that it feels deeply - if I can use a binary term - feminine."
"There’s a girliness to it. That word is often used as a derisive term, but to me, there’s a celebration of female friendship in She-Hulk that’s really fun," she added.
The English is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video, and She-Hulk is available to watch on Disney+.
