Emily Blunt is no stranger to switching up her appearance or her physique to accommodate the film she’s doing. She had to go through a similar process for Girl on the Train, where she couldn’t stand her transformation.
Why Emily Blunt signed up for ‘Girl on the Train’
Girl on the Train was a 2016 psychological thriller based on Paula Hawkins’ novel of the same name written. Blunt played alcoholic Rachel Watson, a character who found herself entangled in a missing persons case. The book was already a worldwide phenomenon before it hit theaters. Blunt was able to recognize its popularity from her travels alone.
“I hadn’t read the book when I got approached about it. I’d just seen everyone reading the book on vacation or on the subway — the train! So when I was approached, I read it and very quickly saw why it was this phenomenon,” she once said in an interview with Refinery 29.
Blunt had already played a wide range of characters in her film career prior to Girl on the Train. But the 2016 feature presented her with a role she hadn’t quite done yet before.
“Rachel is very toxic, physically and emotionally; an incredibly tortured, self-loathing sort of person, and I thought it was thrilling to have a protagonist that’s a blackout drunk. So it was a combination of the personal challenge for me and also the idea of this unreliable narrator, which I thought was so cool,” Blunt said.
Emily Blunt hated how ‘awful’ she was made to look in ‘The Girl on the Train’
Because of the mental instability of her character, Blunt had to look as unpleasant as possible for the role. But the team behind her makeover might have done too good of a job.
“It was hard seeing myself look so awful. I came into work with no make-up and they would make me look even worse, adding rosacea and bags,” Blunt once said in an interview with news au. “I could barely look at my own reflection.”
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But there was one part of her transformation the Jungle Cruise star didn’t mind so much.
“I also had full contact lenses that covered my entire eyes for the really drunk stuff that gave the whites of my eye a bloodshot effect. And there were different levels, like pink was a bit buzzed, and then raging drunk was a really red eye,” she said. “I loved the contact lenses because it gives such a strange glassiness. People look scary when they’re really drunk — there’s something in their eyes that is so crazy.”
Emily Blunt used drunk celebrities as inspiration for her ‘awful’ look
Blunt credited her makeup artist Kyra Panchenko for making the actor look her worst in the film. In addition to the book, the pair looked at drunk celebrities as a template for Blunt’s character.
“She pulled up every celebrity’s drunk driving mugshot that we could find, so we had hilarious pictures of people — who will remain nameless! — all over the makeup bus, and we were trying to make me look like them,” she said.
Doing so further helped with filling out the details of Blunt’s drunken state in the movie.
“We really focused on what happens to the face when you’re drunk; what it does to your skin, to your eyes. She created rosacea all over me, that sort of sallow, gray hue to the skin, and brought out every blemish I had,” Blunt added.
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