The 'Girl on the Train' Cast on Moving the Story to New York to Investigate the 'Underbelly of Domestic Life'

Before Paula Hawkins’s blockbuster novel The Girl on the Train boarded the train transporting it from the page to the big screen, the story unfolded in London. But when the film version disembarks in theaters on Friday, readers will discover that the setting has moved across the Atlantic to New York’s Westchester County.

Connected to busy, bustling Manhattan by the Metro-North commuter line, this suburban oasis of Hudson River towns provides the backdrop to Hawkins’s mystery involving three different women linked by one murder. “I don’t have an issue with the fact that it moved from England, just because I think it’s such a cinematic journey from the Hudson Valley to Grand Central [Terminal],” Girl on the Train star Emily Blunt tells Yahoo Movies about the film’s change of scenery. “The perfection of those cookie-cutter white-picket-fenced houses offers a more interesting visual for the underbelly of domestic life.”

Blunt’s co-stars largely echo her feelings. “It didn’t really matter to me that it was [set] in New York — it could be anywhere in the world,” remarks Luke Evans, who plays the husband of the missing woman (Haley Bennett) whom Blunt’s emotionally troubled character, Rachel, frequently spots from the window of her train car. “Human beings are very inquisitive. We’re voyeuristic, even more so in this day and age than ever before.”