![]() ![]() My mum’s a great linguist – I was really inspired by that. I thought I wanted to be a linguist, maybe a translator for the UN. ‘I had a deliberate resistance to it because I couldn’t imagine doing a job where you had to speak all the time. ‘I know that’s a good soundbite, but I really didn’t want to be an actress,’ she says. It’s a story that sounds like the plot of a film: the stuttering child saved by acting, but even though her raw talent shone through early on, Emily herself was the one person who doubted it. ‘I found that one of the ways I could speak normally back then was if I did a silly voice or an accent,’ she says. For Emily, it was a high-school teacher who changed everything by encouraging her to try acting as a way of managing her stutter. She now campaigns for the American Institute for Stuttering, and as such has been known to turn up on the doorsteps of young stutterers to offer them advice and encouragement. It’s incredible to think how life actually turned out for this terrified Tiny Tim the traumatised seven-year-old stutterer who became one of the most celebrated actresses of her generation. People don’t get that it’s a biological disability that’s usually hereditary.’ Because people sound funny, they look funny when they talk and it’s very readily bullied and made fun of. ‘It misrepresents who you are completely, so that’s all people see. ‘A stutter is such a dreadful imposter in your body,’ she adds. I remember just saying to her, “Guess, guess” because I couldn’t say it. And in front of the whole school, a teacher asked me who I’d come as and I was stuttering – Ts were especially challenging for me – and I just couldn’t say it. ‘I’d hurt my knee so at the time I was on crutches and my mother said, “Well, why don’t you go as Tiny Tim from A Christmas Carol?” ‘I was ten years old, it was Christmas, and everyone at school was dressed as festive characters,’ she says, between sips of water from a gigantic bottle. ![]() So I ask her to make me feel better by telling me an embarrassing story and what she comes out with is a profound insight into the woman she’s become. If you need to go and clean it up, I can wait.’ ‘Oh god, I can hear it, that’s gross,’ says Emily, covering her face in her hands, shoulders shaking with laughter. I hadn’t seen my dog walk into the room, but suddenly we both hear her. We’re happily chatting away – and we’ll cover a lot of ground, from her stellar career to her superstar marriage – when something mortifying happens at my end. Picture the scene: the British actress has arrived in Spain just an hour earlier and is Zooming me from her hotel room. But during the course of my chat with Emily Blunt, I accidentally stumbled across the ultimate test of just that. Hollywood superstars are often at pains to let you know how down to earth they are. ![]()
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