Actress Emily Blunt’s various on-screen characters are often dubbed strong female leads, and it’s a descriptor that the British star is sick of.
Speaking with The Telegraph (via IndieWire) whilst out promoting her just-released Amazon Prime western revenge series “The English,” the “Jungle Cruise” star says she has gotten bored of receiving scripts with the character labelled a ‘strong female lead’:
“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. Those roles are written as incredibly stoic, you spend the whole time acting tough and saying tough things.”
That’s one of the big reasons she was drawn to “The English”, as her character is “more surprising” than the archetype describes.
Blunt stars in the series as a frontier woman hellbent on avenging the death of her son and partners with an indigenous farmer (Chaske Spencer), who is also on a mission in order to reclaim his land.
Talking about her character, she says:
“She’s innocent without being naive, and that makes her a force to be reckoned with. I love a character with a secret. And I loved Cornelia’s buoyancy, her hopefulness, her guilelessness… 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.”
Several other actresses have spoken out against the labelling as well recently, most notably “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” lead Tatiana Maslany, who has found it reductive.
