Emily Blunt on the Tragic Epic Romance of The English: “You’ll Have Hearts Pounding”
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The post Emily Blunt on the Tragic Epic Romance of The English: “You’ll Have Hearts Pounding” appeared first on Consequence.
[Editor’s note: The following contains mild spoilers for The English.]
The new Prime Video series The English is an unconventional Western for a number of reasons, but the most central one might be the romance at its center. “It was the most tender love story and surprising love story,” star Emily Blunt tells Consequence. “I loved their chemistry.”
Set in the late 1800s, largely on the wild plains of Kansas and Wyoming, The English focuses on a vengeful Englishwoman (Blunt) and the Pawnee ex-soldier (Chaske Spencer) who becomes an essential part of her quest for revenge. As they work together to fight and survive, a bond develops that was very much by design, according to writer/director Hugo Blick (The Honourable Woman).
“The cowboy picture, at least the ones I respond to, they’re revenge motifs about something that’s been done wrong to our central character, and they go out and get to settle it because no one else can,” Blick says. “And then there’s this other side which is less familiar to the West — the epic romance thing that you might see in a Dr. Zhivago. So you’ve got this wide open, huge issue of revenge, and then that intimacy of a love story. It develops in its own story, its own pace and its own revelations, and it was equally as important from the get-go. So those two rather disparate elements gave the story its tension, and possibly its unusualness.”
Cordelia and Eli first meet in dire straits, both of their lives in peril thanks to the lawless elements of the West, and despite their very different backgrounds become closely bonded very quickly. Spencer says that in reading the script, “I wanted to know more and more, as I kept turning the page, of where their relationship was going. Seeing how they came from two different sides, two different cultures, I found it really fascinating that they found some middle ground and it was built in tragedy and healing.”
Blunt agrees, saying that the bond between Cordelia and Eli is “so beautiful. I thought she was just this sort of buoyant, hopeful oversharer, and he was quite withheld and restrained and a man of few words. And so it made for these lovely sparkly scenes between them as they reveal more and more of themselves to each other and need each other to survive, need each other desperately.”
The ebb and flow of the relationship over these six episodes came quite naturally to the actors, though they did put in a little development in advance. “We would rehearse over Zoom before we got to Spain,” Blunt says. “Then we had a couple of weeks in Spain to talk about it. But I don’t think we overworked any of the scenes. We mainly just talked about it and realized how similarly we approached them and felt about them.”
The English (Prime Video)
“It was quite easy working with her,” Spencer agrees. “We did the research before we got there, so it just felt so at ease going into the scenes, and between takes and setups. And we didn’t over-rehearse it too much — even in the heavy scenes, we kind of kept it light, just so we could go there.”
Blick says that that level of chemistry made his job, in the more tender moments between Cordelia and Eli, that much easier. “That’s my luck,” he says. “Something about the scripts spoke to both of them in a kind of bullseye quality to what they felt they could contribute. It doesn’t always happen, but when it does, if you’re a good director, you just do two things. You set the camera in the right place and you get the hell out of the way, and then don’t over-torture it.”
Adds Blick, “Emily and Chaske, in those intimate scenes, are my favorite in the whole picture. Two or three takes, It was done. Because they were so together in that charismatic moment, it was like I was watching it for the first time — I hadn’t written it, I didn’t recognize the writing. I just witnessed the relationship. And if you get that, you kind of get a sense that there’s something quite interesting here. So hopefully the audience will feel the same.”
A key aspect of their burgeoning romance is of course what these characters don’t have in common, though as Blunt points out, “What’s exciting and emboldening about our show is that the fact that Eli is a Native American is irrelevant to Cornelia. Whatever it is about their relationship that’s outside of the social norms is irrelevant to them. All they need to do is to survive. That’s what they see in each other, is a need to survive.”
As the bond between Cordelia and Eli grows deeper, Blick notes, the most important challenge was making sure the viewer is on board. “It is everything. You’ve got the archetype of a romance — that’s what the story is, so therefore you are expecting it to happen. But you have to make it absolutely organic to the characters in which the audience are invested in. Otherwise it will feel pressurized and constructed and structured. So I hoped that it feels organic and truthful. It certainly did. When we filmed it, it came very organically and fluidly. And I was very impressed by the results.” He laughs. “I was the first to see it, and I knew they did a great job.”
Blunt praises Blick specifically for how he went about creating the character of Eli, “in the tradition of Paul Newman and Clint Eastwood and those kinds of incredible widescreen epic cinematic heroes. He just happens to be Native American. That in itself is a moment that hopefully will inspire more characters like that to be written for Native American actors.”
Adds Blunt, “I loved what [Spencer] did with the part. I loved Eli. I just loved him. I think everyone will love him, to be honest. You’ll have hearts pounding for this character. It’s the truth.”
Without getting specific about spoilers, The English doesn’t end like a storybook romance. As Blick puts it, “What’s the future for an aristocratic Englishwoman and a Pawnee ex-cavalry scout in 1890? Well, go ahead and watch it and find out. There’s something very beautiful in its destination. And it might not be the one [audiences] expect. It’s not necessarily tragic. It’s something else.”
What that something is might be different things to different people. But the power of this love story is not diminished.
The English is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video.
Emily Blunt on the Tragic Epic Romance of The English: “You’ll Have Hearts Pounding”
Liz Shannon Miller
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