Summary

  • Emily Blunt reflects on her role in Sicario, highlighting the movie's intense atmosphere and its ability to make audiences feel like her character.
  • Sicario was a significant role for Blunt, establishing her as capable of both action and drama, and further solidifying her as a household name.
  • Blunt's performance in Sicario was highly acclaimed, leading to Oscar buzz and opening doors for more high-profile projects in her career.

Though having a number of iconic roles under her belt, Emily Blunt is sharing why Sicario remains one of her favorite movies to date. Blunt starred in the 2015 action thriller as Kate Macer, an ambitious FBI Special Agent who finds herself in a violent new world as she joins a Joint Task Force with the CIA to flush out a Mexican cartel lieutenant operating in the US. Also starring Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro, Sicario was a critical and commercial hit upon release, leading to a 2018 sequel and an in-development threequel.

While appearing on the latest episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast to discuss Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, Emily Blunt reflected on her time working on Denis Villeneuve's Sicario. When asked why she still considers the movie one of her favorite roles, the Golden Globe winner looked to the movie's sheer scale, which she admits to not recognizing during production, and its intense atmosphere. See what Blunt shared in the quotes and video below:

I don’t know if, during it, I saw the full scope of what [Denis Villeneuve] was doing. I think when I saw it, and was so gripped by the throat by it, I didn’t realize how much you would feel like her as an audience member. I didn’t realize she would bring you into it in the way that she does, and she is as in the dark as the audience are. It is an incoherent world where someone is in way over their head, and the panic that instills in audiences watching it was so cool, and how taut and muscular the whole thing felt when watching it. And how stunning it looked because of Roger Deakins, it was just beautiful to look at, just groundbreakingly so. So, I do see why that one resonates with people, but I felt that with Oppenheimer. I was absolutely staggered by it when I saw it, I felt like my bones were going to break, I had no idea it would move as propulsively and viscerally as it did, it was just stunning.

Editor's Note: This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, and the movie covered here would not exist without the labor of the writers and actors in both unions.

Why Sicario Is One Of Emily Blunt's Most Important Roles

Kate holds a gun while walking through a tunnel in Sicario

At the time of Sicario's release, Blunt had been enjoying a steady rise to stardom in Hollywood thanks to the likes of The Wolfman remake, which also starred del Toro, the Tom Cruise-led Edge of Tomorrow and movie adaptation of the Broadway musical Into the Woods, which netted her her fifth Golden Globe nomination. Prior to these roles, Blunt was better known for more modest productions, or in supporting roles, ranging from The Devil Wears Prada to Sunshine Cleaning.

Despite having a strong filmography behind her heading into the 2015 thriller, Sicario does ultimately remain one of Blunt's most important roles to date. Fresh off of Edge of Tomorrow, it continued to establish her as capable of both action-heavy roles as well as those with deeper dramatic layers, both of which she'd show in her subsequent roles of The Huntsman: Winter's War and adaptation of the mystery thriller The Girl on the Train.

Sicario also further established Blunt as a household name as audiences kept an eye on the star for potential Oscar nods, with many feeling her to have been snubbed come awards season. This didn't slow her down, though, as Blunt forged ahead with more high-profile projects, including the Disney legacy sequel Mary Poppins Returns, which marked her most recent Golden Globe nod, the A Quiet Place movies, and Nolan's Oppenheimer, for which she's already garnering plenty of awards talk. With her character also having survived the original movie, it would be interesting to see if Blunt elects to return for the potential Sicario 3.

Source: Happy Sad Confused