After a string of high-profile projects, including Into the Woods, A Quiet Place, and Mary Poppins Returns, Emily Blunt says she’s taking a yearlong break from acting.
“This year I’m not working,” she revealed on a recent episode of the Table for Two With Bruce Bozzi podcast. “I worked quite a bit last year, and my oldest baby is nine, we’re in the last year of single digits.” Blunt shares her two daughters—Hazel, 9, and Violet, 7—with husband and fellow actor John Krasinski, whom she wed in 2010. “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.”
Blunt, who next appears in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer as Kitty Oppenheimer, the wife of Cillian Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer, said accepting roles that require time away from her kids come at a great “emotional cost,” and that she’s “very prone to guilt.” The actor added, “I think maybe all mothers are. You’re just prone to feeling bad for, God forbid, wanting something outside of being a mother. I am huge advocate for it—I’m a huge advocate for women being ambitious. I love the word ambition. It’s just dreams with purpose, that’s all it is, it’s not an ugly word.”
In addition to Oppenheimer, Blunt has a few more projects set for release during her hiatus, including David Yates’s crime drama Pain Hustlers opposite Chris Evans and David Leitch’s action film The Fall Guy, in which she stars alongside Ryan Gosling.