Good news, Emily Blunt fans – the Oppenheimer actor is not quitting Hollywood for good, despite what you might have read.
Earlier this month, the Devil Wears Prada star told the Table For Two podcast that she had decided not to take on any new projects this year in order to spend more time with her young daughters.
Her comments prompted a slew of headlines suggesting that Emily was turning her back on acting, which she has since clarified in an interview with The Guardian.
“I’m not quitting Hollywood,” she told the paper. “It’s OK, guys. Just taking a little bit of downtime.” Phew.
During her Table For Two interview, the three-time Bafta nominee explained that she made her decision because she didn’t want to miss out on the “cornerstones” of her daughters’ daily routines, like dropping them off at school and putting them to bed.
The star shares nine-year-old Hazel and seven-year-old Violet with her husband and A Quiet Place co-star John Krasinski, to whom she has been married since 2010.
“This year, I’m not working,” she said, adding: “I worked quite a bit last year and my oldest baby is nine, like, we’re in the last year of single digits.”
“I just feel there are cornerstones to their day that are so important when they’re little,” she continued. “And it’s, ‘Will you wake me up? Will you take me to school? Will you pick me up? Will you put me to bed?’
“And I just need to be there for all of them ― for a good stretch. And I just felt that in my bones.”
Emily went on to explain that she now takes on fewer “time-consuming” projects as they have an “emotional cost” for her and her family.
“The ones that are time-consuming, I think for me are becoming few and further between because of just the emotional cost on me, on the kids, on balance,” she said, noting that she is “very prone to guilt.”
“I think maybe all mothers are,” she added. “You’re just prone to feeling bad for, god forbid, wanting something outside of being a mother.”
Emily – who plays Kitty Oppenheimer, the wife of nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, in Christopher Nolan’s latest film – also said that she sometimes struggles to balance her work life.
“I’ll work too much, and then I’ll have a complete reaction against it and an aversion to being on a film set for some time,” she revealed. “And then I’ll desperately want to work again.”