Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt’s new movie The Fall Guy follows a stunt performer becoming an unlikely hero in his quest to find a missing actor from his ex-girlfriend’s action movie. Emily Blunt will be the lucky lady portraying the role of the up-and-coming action director. While Blunt has no real-life directing experience, she’s made sure to credit her director husband John Krasinski for positively influencing her on how to portray a director.
While The Fall Guy was an important film to make for shedding light on the stunt crew community, female directors will be getting their props too. After all, there are many badass action movies directed by female directors like Kathryn Bigelow, Patty Jenkins, Gina Prince-Bythewood, and more. So why not see on the big screen a female character taking on the challenge of being behind the camera? With Emily Blunt playing an aspiring director and having never been a real-life director before, she told People she used her actor/director husband John Krasinski as inspiration to draw on.
I am married to a director, I know what it's like to hold the tempest of the movie in your head and the pressures and being pulled in a million directions.
Emily Blunt was directed by husband John Krasinski in A Quiet Place where they played a married couple trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world threatened by murderous aliens. Blunt wanted to be part of her husband’s project so much that she broke her own five-months-between-movies rule for him as she was already working on Mary Poppins Returns. But when you think about it, how can you miss the opportunity to work with your life partner who looks at you like you’re the greatest person in the world? The answer is you can’t.
Sadly, John Krasinski’s character gets killed off at the end of A Quiet Place which meant having more of a behind-the-scenes presence still being the sequel's director. While the real-life married duo only shared screen time in Part II’s opening flashback scene, The Devil Wears Prada actress said working with her husband as her director was still special to her to see what more The Office actor can do making this sequel so much bigger than the last.
While Emily Blunt’s Fall Guy character of Jody Banks places priority in making her directorial debut, it doesn’t mean we’ll see her as the serious “straight man” trope against Ryan Gosling’s comedy stylings. She continued to explain what she loved the most about her character.
I liked her eccentricity, I liked her humanity. She was fun to me. I just loved her. I like that we didn't do the sort of earnest, serious director. I was keen to show somebody in a situation where she was way over her head and yet she's incredible and talented.
I’m glad that we get to see Emily Blunt play a fun character. We tend to see in comedies the male lead telling the jokes while the female lead is the serious one trying to maintain control over the film’s hilarious situation like in Knocked Up or The Break-Up. It’s nice that we get to see the comedy chops of both leads. Based on their witty banter at the Oscars bringing on their Barbenheimer beef with each other, it’s no wonder people who first saw The Fall Guy loved Blunt and Gosling’s on-screen chemistry.
When you watch The Fall Guy and you see Emily Blunt is very impressive playing an aspiring director, you can thank her director husband John Krasinski for being a positive influence on her character building. It proves she paid very close attention to her hubby during their time on the Quiet Place movies to know how to play the talent behind the camera. The 2024 movie release will be playing in theaters on May 3rd.
