The Art of Being Blunt

Emily Blunt, the star of the hauntingly dark film the girl on the train, opens up about looking drunk, acting truthful, and choosing her words carefully.

- Amy Synnott

It wasn’t easy transforming Emily Blunt into a bloated alcoholic for her starring role in the highly anticipated thriller The Girl on the Train. First, there were the cheek plumpers. “The prosthetic people created these molds that clipped onto my teeth to make my face seem puffy,” says Blunt, who, along with her makeup artist, Kyra Panchenko, studied mug shots of drunk drivers to get the look just right. “When we were filming, we were very specific about where she was during the day: how drunk she was, whether or not she was hungover,” says Blunt. “Kyra is so talented. She used gray eye shadow under my eyes to bring out the circles and a little brush to paint spider veins all over my face.” And perhaps the strangest act of makeup subterfuge? A series of bloodshot contact lenses that were switched based on her level of intoxication (pink for tipsy, red for drunk, yellow for hungover). “She’s beautiful, so it was quite hard to make her look horrible,” says Tate Taylor, who directed the film. “I kept saying to the crew, ‘All right, can we get them back in here and make her look a little more drunk and ugly?’ ”

At first, Blunt admits, it was challenging to wrap her mind around the character, a depressed alcoholic who is obsessed with her ex-husband and his new wife (not to mention a random couple who lives a few doors down from them). “The way I live my life is just so dissimilar,” says the actress, who was pregnant with her second daughter, Violet, during filming. To prep for the role, she watched episodes of the documentary series Intervention. “I needed to understand what addiction does to you physically and mentally and how it affects your self-esteem. This woman I play onscreen is so damaged, so broken down, that people don’t even want to breathe the same air as her.”