The actress opened up about the challenges of finding chemistry with her costars during an appearance on ‘The Howard Stern Show’
Emily Blunt is getting candid about what happens when an actor doesn’t quite mesh with a castmate — especially filming romantic scenes.
During an appearance on The Howard Stern Show on April 30, the British actress, 41, opened up about how she builds chemistry with her fellow actors for each of her movies. She revealed to host Howard Stern that on multiple occasions, “I’ve had chemistry with people I haven’t liked.”
When Stern, 70, came right out and asked her, “Who?” Blunt responded simply, “I’m not gonna tell you.”
“I have had chemistry with people who… I have not had a good time working with them,” she said, still refusing to reveal any names.
“Sometimes it’s a strange thing. Sometimes you could have a rapport that’s really effortless, but it doesn’t translate onscreen,” she said, speaking of the ways she tries to establish chemistry. “Chemistry is this strange thing. It’s an ethereal thing that you can’t really bottle up and buy or sell. It’s like there or it’s not.”
“It’s just easier when you have a natural rapport with someone,” she added.
Blunt also spoke about some tactics she uses to find chemistry with a costar when there isn’t much — such as attempting to find something she likes about her fellow actor in order to try and create a better rapport on camera.
“I’ve got to find something I love about everybody. I have to find something … Even if it’s one thing,” she told Stern.
“It might be that they have a nice laugh or I like how they speak to people. They’re polite. I mean, it might be something random,” she continued. “But find something you love about that person or something you love about them as the character and then kind of lean into that.”
Despite her attempts to spark chemistry between her and her romantic counterpart’s characters, Blunt said that some moments on set have been downright gross.
“Have you wanted to throw up?” Stern asked Blunt about kissing a fellow actor on set, to which she replied: “Absolutely. Absolutely.”
“I wouldn’t say it’s sort of extreme loathing, but I’ve definitely not enjoyed some of it,” she added.
In recent years, Blunt has appeared onscreen alongside Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in Jungle Cruise, her husband, John Krasinski, in A Quiet Place and Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer.
As she was appearing on Stern’s show to promote her new action-comedy The Fall Guy, in which she stars alongside Ryan Gosling, Blunt took a moment to confirm that the Barbie star, 43, was absolutely an actor she enjoyed working with.
“I love his wife, Eva. I love their children, and I feel like I’m very lucky to be friends with a gem of a person like him,” she said of Gosling.
Blunt isn’t the only actress to open up about not wanting to kiss her costars. Earlier this month, Anne Hathaway recalled a particularly “gross” request in which casting agents would ask her to “make out” with as many as 10 people in a day for auditions.
In an interview with V Magazin, Hathaway, 41, recalled how chemistry tests were treated early in her career.
“Back in the 2000s — and this did happen to me — it was considered normal to ask an actor to make out with other actors to test for chemistry, which is actually the worst way to do it,” she told the outlet.
She continued, “I was told, ‘We have 10 guys coming today and you’re cast. Aren’t you excited to make out with all of them?’ And I thought, ‘Is there something wrong with me?’ because I wasn’t excited. I thought it sounded gross.”
Hathaway explained that she was “so young,” as well as “terribly aware how easy it was to lose everything by being labeled “difficult.’ ”
“So I just pretended I was excited and got on with it,” she added. “It wasn’t a power play; no one was trying to be awful or hurt me. It was just a very different time, and now we know better.”
