Emily Blunt on her role in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Emily Blunt can speak Mandarin. Of sorts. “I only know how to speak about river beds and water pressure,” she says with a laugh.

Emily Blunt can speak Mandarin. Of sorts. “I only know how to speak about river beds and water pressure,” she says with a laugh.

“Literally, all I know is how to talk about the engineering of salmon fishing. I can’t even say hello. Actually, I don’t think I even know the word for salmon.”

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If she hadn’t become an actor Blunt would have liked to have been a translator or an interpreter. Instead, in the last five years the 29-year-old has become one of Hollywood’s most in-demand stars, albeit one with a very niche grasp on one of the world’s trickiest languages.

This is shaping up to be a busy year for Blunt, who stars in three very different films. First up is Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (hence the fishy Mandarin), the big-screen adaptation of the hugely popular 2006 novel by Paul Torday.

Quirky, eccentric, warm and very, very British, the film follows the story of a billionaire sheikh who fishes for salmon on his estate in the Scottish Highlands and dreams of introducing the species to the Yemen. Blunt plays the exceedingly polished, fluent-in-Mandarin investment consultant Harriet Chetwode-Talbot who is enlisted to help make his implausible dream a reality.

She in turn recruits Dr Alfred Jones, a tweedy, sceptical Scottish fisheries expert played by Ewan McGregor. As the two embark on their improbable mission, sparks begin to fly like, um, fish leaping up a salmon ladder.

In a vast, lavender-hued suite in Claridge’s, Blunt sits with her legs slung over the arm of a big chair, one foot encased in a black rubber ankle support thanks to a niggling Achilles tendon injury. It came off briefly the previous night for the European premiere of the film, but she whipped off her towering Christian Louboutins and strapped it back on “the second I got back in the car”. Though she enjoys playing dressing-up on the red carpet, and is frequently lauded as a style icon, she certainly comes across as more of a jeans-and-flats gal.

Indeed, today she wears jeans, a white t-shirt and a pair of elegant, pointed flats. Her centre-parted hair sits in a sharp bob, her face is English-rose pretty yet interesting; pale, freckled skin, bold features, prominent cheekbones and a very pinchable cleft chin. Her accent is decidedly middle-class, but she lets slip the occasional expletive. Her response to the prospect of ending up on some “worst-dressed” list, for example, is a straightforward “who gives a f*ck?”.

Ewan McGregor was, she says, “hopping from foot to foot with excitement” at the prospect of filming in the Scottish Highlands, and for Blunt the opportunity to shoot in such a dramatic setting was just as appealing. “It’s very transporting when you’re filming in these locations,” she says. “You soak up the atmosphere like a sponge and I do think it translates on screen, more than doing it in the backyard at Pinewood. Scotland was just beautiful, majestic.”

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So, can she fish? “I did have a go,” she says, head in hands, an expression of shame passing over her pretty features. “I caught Ewan McGregor’s dog. It was my first cast, he was scampering around behind me and it got caught in his fur. I never did it again after hearing his poor little yelp. I went back inside, sat by the fire and read a book.”

It wasn’t her first experience of fishing, neither was it her worst. A childhood holiday spent deep-sea fishing in Scotland was just as disastrous: “It was February. The waves were huge. I just threw up over the side of the boat the entire time.”

One of four siblings, Blunt was born and brought up in London, the daughter of stage actress Joanna Mackie and high-profile QC Oliver Blunt, who defended serial killer Peter Tobin. A debilitating stutter made her a quiet child and when an enterprising teacher suggested that acting in a school play might help her overcome the problem she was horrified. Her solution was to adopt an accent for the part, and, like the climactic ending to a dreamy feelgood film, it worked. She performed, stutter-free, in front of 200 people.

“I was always able to do voices and impersonate people when I was a kid, even when I had a terrible stutter,” she says. “I never had it when I would do a silly voice. I know a lot of actors who stutter and acting is the only way they can speak fluently. I never stutter when I’m acting or on stage because I think you sort of distance yourself from yourself. It’s like you’re taking on a different role or a different persona so you alienate the stutter from what you’re doing, in a way.”

While the acting bug didn’t quite bite at that stage, it had a nibble, and Blunt went on to attend the private sixth-form college Hurtwood House, which is famous for its performing arts programme. She then made her professional debut in a musical at the Edinburgh Fringe, where she was discovered by the agent who still represents her today.

“My sister and I were there the whole time and we had a riot,” she says. “I don’t think we slept for a month. It’s the most stimulating place on the planet at that time and we were probably in the pub most nights behaving badly. I remember entering into it all just thinking I could earn some extra money. I didn’t have this desire to act. I was just thinking ‘oh, this will be fun …’”

After playing Isolda in the 2003 film Boudica and some TV work, a year on she was starring in her first feature film, My Summer of Love, but it was a breakout role in 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada which catapulted her into the A-list. Playing Emily, a ruthless, bitchy assistant at a fashion magazine, she stole the show from co-stars Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep – no mean feat – and the performance (so good that the film’s ending was reshot to bring back the character) cemented her arrival in Hollywood.

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In the six years since, starring roles in Sunshine Cleaning, The Young Victoria and The Adjustment Bureau have helped establish her as one of the top young British actresses in Tinseltown. Next up this year is a comedy turn in The Five-Year Engagement opposite Jason Segal, followed by a role in sci-fi thriller Looper in the autumn.

The industry Blunt says, touching wood, has “been kind” to her thus far, but throughout her career she has clung to a particular piece of advice from her father. Having seen many people get “crushed” by Hollywood, she understands how terrifying it must be for a parent when their child decides to have a go at that business they call Show: “It’s a very personal job and you’re getting rejected in a very personal way time and time again. So you’ve got to just let it be like water off a duck’s back. It’s one of my father’s favourite phrases and I’ve always tried to be that way. Always.”

Tom Hanks, with whom she starred in 2007’s Charlie Wilson’s War, told her that any actor is just one film away from being a massive movie star and just one film away from not being one. With this in mind, she is wary of becoming too comfortable with the success she’s achieved in a few short years, but with an impressive variety of roles already under her belt she’s certainly enjoying it.

Today she lives in LA with her husband, actor John Krasinski, who plays the much-loved Jim in the US version of The Office. The couple married in 2010 at George Clooney’s Lake Como home in front of friends including Matt Damon and Meryl Streep. As luvvielicious as it all sounds, however, Blunt makes a concerted effort to socialise outside of the industry and to escape what she describes as the “Neverland experience” of being on set.

Her co-stars read like a Who’s Who of Hollywood – Streep, Damon, Willis, Hopkins, Hanks – something she describes as “surreal”. “I do feel that’s the word I’d use for working with a lot of these people I’ve admired or watched for years,” she says, cringing as she recalls a particular memory. “It was an odd moment [filming a love scene] with Tom Hanks; I’m crawling all over him in my underwear and I’m thinking ‘oh my God, I grew up watching you’.”

If she ever feels starstruck in the presence of Hollywood royalty, she makes a concerted effort not to show it, though she did get a bit giggly when she met Barack Obama recently. Does she ever have preconceptions about her mega- famous co-stars before she meets them on set? “You have an idea of what you think people are going to be like and I’m more often than not surprised, and then a bit guilty, that I have bought into something that I’ve heard about them in the media.

“Sometimes it’s based on characters that people play. I’ve met a few people who’ll say, ‘oh, I thought you were going to be a bitch …’”

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She’s far from it, of course, though it’s testament to the impact her character in The Devil Wears Prada had on the cinemagoing public that she might be viewed as such. The character of Harriet, however, is distinctly warm and fuzzy, and with Salmon Fishing … already being touted as the biggest British comedy of 2012, perhaps she’s likely to linger in the public consciousness.

“Copious numbers of Blunts” attended the premiere of Salmon Fishing … with some family members seeing it for the second time. Unlike Blunt, her parents had both read Torday’s novel long before there was any talk of turning it into a film, and were particularly excited by their daughter’s role in it.

Indeed, it is exactly the kind of film you might imagine taking your mother and your granny along to see. Cosy, uplifting and snortingly funny in an inimitably British way (look out for a hilarious turn by Kristin Scott Thomas as a government spin doctor), it also has an achingly sweet love story at its heart. Both Harriet and Alfred are in relationships when they meet, so their courtship is one of longing looks and lingering glances, “a sort of decorum that’s charming and timeless”.

“She was such a great chick to play,” says Blunt of the unflappable Harriet: “I’m always looking for parts that defy just being the girlfriend or the wife or the nag. I’m really careful to find women who are written in a complex way and I think this film is very character rich. It was all there with very little to add. Sometimes I’ve signed on to a film and felt I had to sit down with the writer and the director to collaborate on ideas to make [the character] better, more interesting, more complex. I didn’t need to do anything with this role.”

Much has already been made of her on-screen chemistry with McGregor, though she finds the word rather silly. She adopts a faux-sultry voice as she tells me she’s been brought in for a “chemistry test” for romantic roles more than once in the past, and chuckles out loud at the absurdity of it all: “It’s such rubbish. Chemistry is such an ethereal thing and I think you either have it and click with someone, or you don’t. And if you don’t, you cultivate it. It’s your job.”

She has already decided that after finishing the promotion for Salmon Fishing … she won’t work again until the autumn. She’ll read books, travel, spend time at home with her family, friends and husband, and won’t particularly concern herself with the next step in her film career.

This laidback approach is one that many actors would struggle with, but Blunt insists that she rather enjoys not having everything in her life entirely mapped out.

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“What I’ve come to really enjoy about the job is that I don’t quite know what’s coming next, that I can’t categorise the part I want to play, the direction I want to go in,” she says. “The great unknown has become quite a positive thing for me, that I don’t know what I’m going to find when I open the next script, how I’m going to feel or respond. I just love the element of surprise...”

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (12A) is in cinemas nationwide now.

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