“She can’t be in this masculine world trying to act like a man”: Emily Blunt Laid Down Her Demand in $85M Taylor Sheridan Movie After Studio Tried to Replace Her With a Male Actor

Emily Blunt in The Huntsman: Winter’s War . | Credit: Universal Pictures.

Emily Blunt has landed a lot of fan-favorite roles and worked with a multiplicity of filmmakers and screenwriters throughout her career, with Taylor Sheridan being one of them since the pair worked on Sicario together. In fact, her iconic role of Kate Macer in this very movie was one that the studios wanted for a male actor.

Fortunately for her, all of this ended up in her favor in more than one way. For one, Blunt managed to score the role in the $85 million movie instead of letting herself get replaced by a male actor. For another, after getting cast in the role, she perfectly laid down her one demand on how she was going to play her character in that macho world which was effectively taken care of by the director.

Emily Blunt Had the Most Reasonable Demand for Sicario

In Sicario, the main protagonist is a female, Kate Macer, brought perfectly to life by Emily Blunt. As seen in the film, Blunt’s character is, incredibly, feminine enough despite existing as an FBI Agent in a macho world. And, truly enough, Blunt pulled this off so efficiently that instead of looming like a contrasting difference, her character perfectly fits in as the most integral part of the movie.

Moreover, it was all thanks to the understanding between her and filmmaker Denis Villeneuve. According to what the Oppenheimer actress herself shared in an interview with Vulture, what she needed to add the perfect balance to her character was “a director who’s going to support your creation of a character,” and Villeneuve was “so empowering in that sense.”

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As Blunt continued candidly with Vulture:

I told him in the beginning, ‘She can’t be in this masculine world trying to act like a man.’ The appeal of playing the part was that in the beginning, you have a character who’s highly skilled but then disintegrates at an accelerated rate over the course of three days. It had to be a delicate balance.

As for what made her realize this delicate balance and how she was going to pull it into effect? Well, as Blunt confessed during the same interview:

I based her on one of the FBI agents I met while doing research. She was really shy, but also an incredibly resilient, steely individual.

Effortlessly enough, The Fall Guy actress did her total research before jumping into this iconic role in Taylor Sheridan‘s movie and unarguably ended up doing an amazing job at it, only further proving that she was actually the perfect choice for the role instead of how the studios wanted it to play out, i.e. with a male character in the lead instead.

Studios Wanted Emily Blunt’s Character to be a Male

Sure enough, Blunt did an excellent job in bringing that perfect balance of strong-and-determined-but-vulnerable aspects to her character. However, the studios originally felt it would be better if a male actor led the masterpiece instead of Blunt’s female protagonist.

In fact, as the interviewer at Vice said while interviewing Benicio del Toro, “The studio people wanted a guy and they’d be like, ‘We’d give you more money if it was a dude.'”

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Echoing her statement, even del Toro admitted, saying (via Vice/YouTube):

At some point, the producers took it to this other company and they go, they said that, which would have made a big mistake because I think the movie is strong because of that.

Of course, Blunt was indeed one of the most driving and powerful forces in that movie, which can be further proven by how the sequel (although Sheridan wouldn’t call it that), Sicario: Day of the Soldado, couldn’t perform better than the first film because it lacked this very feminine-but-bold force that Blunt brought to the table as Kate.

You can streamSicario on Prime Video.