It's a good day to be Emily Blunt. She's got the low-key comedy Salmon Fishing in the Yemen in theaters now, the big-name comedy The Five Year Engagement opening the Tribeca Film Festival this week, and the trailer for her upcoming thriller Looper now online shows off even more of her range. And now word has broken at Variety that not only has she been picked to star opposite Tom Cruise in the futuristic thriller All You Need Is Kill, but she's one of the top choices to star opposite Johnny Depp in Rob Marshall's remake of The Thin Man.
Got all that? Let's start getting into details with All You Need Is Kill. Director Doug Liman recently revealed that it would likely be his next project once Tom Cruise's schedule allowed for it, and with Blunt now in talks for the co-starring role, they indeed seem ready to move ahead. Cruise stars as a soldier killed in a war against aliens who finds himself living the day of his death over and over, Groundhog Day-style. As another soldier fighting opposite him, Blunt is probably the Andie McDowell of this movie, but since the circumstances sound so different it's unlikely the role will be nearly that simple.
As for The Thin Man, also a Warner Bros. project, Blunt had been on the shortlist of potential co-stars revealed a few weeks ago, and now she's apparently one of the finalists, alongside Kristen Wiig and Emma Stone. All three seemed to have the most obvious comedic skills of the actreses on that shortlist, and any seem like a reasonable update of Myrna Loy's classic performance as Nora Charles, but there's still the question of how Depp will fare with that kind of quick-witted comedy. Don't let the huge age disparity among these actresses bug you though-- Loy was a full 13 years younger than the original Nick Charles, William Powell. OK, so Depp is a full 25 years older than Emma Stone, and 15 older than Blunt, but we're just going to assume Edward Scissorhands can get away with it anyway.
It's unclear when any of these films will be ready to go into production, or how they'll fit into Blunt's plenty busy schedule, but the moral of the story is that she's on the rise. If you've been delighted by her work ever since The Devil Wears Prada as I have, this is nothing but a good thing.
