SILENT FRIGHT

A QUIET PLACE MADE A LOT OF NOISE. NOW JOHN KRASINSKI RETURNS TO DIRECT A QUIET PLACE PART II, AS EMILY BLUNT’S BEREAVED NEW MUM ONCE AGAIN BATTLES SOUND-SENSITIVE ALIENS

- JAMIE TABBERER AND IAN BERRIMAN

I FEEL LIKE MARY POPPINS IS VERY chatty…” SFX has just asked Emily Blunt who, out of all her movie characters, would fare worst in A Quiet Place Part II, in which even the slightest noise triggers the gigantic, pulsating eardrums of alien invaders who hunt using sound location. “And The Devil Wears Prada character [Emily Charlton] would be useless in that environment,” she adds.

What would Miranda Priestly’s uptight personal assistant even wear in an apocalypse, one wonders?

“Well, exactly!” muses Blunt, with her trademark deadpan humour. “I don’t think she’d do well with bare feet. I think between the two of them they’d be dead, for sure!”

In a scene straight out of that fashion world flick, we meet the hilarious Blunt and her husband of 10 years, A Quiet Place Part II director John Krasinski, in a plush New York hotel suite, skyline gleaming behind them. After the monstrously successful 2018 original – which grossed $341 million worldwide against a $17 million budget, and which Krasinski also directed and starred in – expectations for the follow-up are as high as the skyscraper we’re sitting in. But if the two are feeling the pressure, they don’t show it: they’re both grinning from ear to ear.

“You definitely get a sense of how it all started,” says Krasinski of the new story. It’s mostly set after the events of the first film – in which his character, Lee, sacrificed himself to save his kids – but also shows, via flashback, the aliens gatecrashing planet Earth.

Krasinski won’t be drawn on whether this means he’ll be returning as an actor for the prequel sequences (“You’ll have to wait and see”), but then the fact that he’s returning as director is perhaps surprise enough.