Emily Blunt Gave A Career-Defining Performance In Her Underrated Western Miniseries On Prime Video

Can you really call yourself a fan of Emily Blunt if you haven't checked out her 2022 Prime Video series "The English?" Created by Hugo Blick — who also wrote and directed the miniseries — "The English" centers around Blunt's protagonist, Lady Cornelia Locke, who crosses the Atlantic Ocean to seek revenge. Set in America's Wild West in 1890, the story follows Lady Locke as she seeks retribution over the death of her son and ends up forming a somewhat unlikely allegiance with a Native American man. If you love the rest of Blunt's body of work, you'll definitely want to queue this one up — especially to see her dynamic with co-star Chaske Spencer, previously best known for his role as Sam Uley in the "Twilight" saga.

Blunt's Cornelia meets former cavalry scout and Pawnee Nation citizen Sergeant Eli Whipp (Spencer) when she heads to a Kansas hotel where, as it happens, Eli is being held hostage on his way to reclaim land that belongs to him in Nebraska. Cornelia ends up a hostage as well because she's so wealthy. After their captor tries to frame Eli for Cornelia's murder, Eli instead bests the man and frees them both. Convinced that she's fated to travel with Eli after this experience, the hardened Cornelia insists that they team up and protect one another, with Eli hellbent on getting his land back after his military service and Cornelia hunting for the man that she believes killed her young son. 

Spencer and Blunt are both phenomenal in the series, and according to Blunt herself, Cornelia was a fascinating, enthralling character that captured her attention from the moment she read the script for "The English."

You might recall that Emily Blunt's career kicked off with "The Devil Wears Prada," and even though she's an incredibly versatile actress, I feel like most people still consider her to mostly be a comedic performer. That's all well and good — and I'm willing to wager than most people learned Blunt was a dramatic powerhouse in 2018 thanks to her husband John Krasinski's horror movie "A Quiet Place" — but it's easy to see why the role of Lady Cornelia Locke appealed to Blunt when you hear from her directly.

"She's the most alive character I've ever read on a page," Blunt told Deadline about Cornelia. "She was so spontaneous and free and really unpredictable. She was so odd in some ways." Speaking to TheWrap, Blunt explained that even Cornelia's more violent moments in her journey contains multitudes. "It's not cool. She doesn't do it with swagger," Blunt said of Cornelia's darker deeds. "She does it with an ability and a purpose. But it's more like instinctive, it sort of just takes her over and she does it, and then the aftermath of it is where the humanity comes out."

Blunt also told Paste Magazine how much she loved the role. "I fell madly in love with [Cornelia] and I love a character with a secret and she certainly has one, how much she withholds on this epic adventure she goes on. I found her endlessly surprising," she said. "She shows up in the Wild West like the feminine ideal and quickly reveals herself to be a force to be reckoned with." Clearly, playing Cornelia was a great journey for Blunt, and before long, she took on another huge dramatic role.

"The English" came out in late 2022, and by that time, Emily Blunt was already actively working on her next project — a little film called "Oppenheimer." If "The English" marked a creative departure of sorts for Blunt, "Oppenheimer," which was written and directed by Christopher Nolan, was a perfect next step. The sprawling film that spans decades of J. Robert Oppenheimer's (Cillian Murphy) life, with a particular focus on his creation of the atomic bomb and the hearings meant to determine if he was part of the Communist party. Blunt plays real-life figure Katherine "Kitty" Oppenheimer, the physicist's long-suffering wife.

Blunt was faced with a challenge in "Oppenheimer": not only is she representing a real woman in Nolan's film, but she's tasked with playing Kitty from the day she meets Robert until the very end of his stressful hearings. Unsurprisingly, Blunt pulls this off perfectly, even as she plays Kitty in the midst of a devastating addiction to alcohol that nearly derails her life. She also gets a truly astounding scene during the hearings themselves where she comes to her husband's defense.

Blunt brings a similar steeliness to both Lady Cornelia Locke in "The English" and Kitty Oppenheimer in "Oppenheimer," and there's no question that she can deftly handle an intense dramatic role as easily as she can make us laugh in something like "The Fall Guy" or, of course, "The Devil Wears Prada." If you want to go check out "The English," it's streaming on Amazon Prime Video now.