Emily Blunt: Being Pregnant During Into the Woods Was a “Transporting Experience” — But Hard to Hide!
Into the maternity wear! Emily Blunt‘s Into the Woods character is a woman who desperately wants a baby but can’t have one, so when the Edge of Tomorrow actress got pregnant in real life before filming, she (and the costume department) had to figure out how to hide her burgeoning bump.
“That was pretty funny,” Blunt’s costar Meryl Streep told Disney twenty-three, the publication of Disney’s official fan club D23. “They were constantly putting James Corden [the Baker] in front of her belly, raising her apron higher and higher.”
Blunt herself joked that she made use of the movie’s arboreal setting. “I was hiding behind every tree in that wood!” the Brit, 31, quipped. “Colleen Atwood, who’s the most remarkable costume designer, as everybody knows, was so accommodating. I would say towards the end, every four or five days they were making some adjustments.”
The wardrobe department wasn’t the only one that had to make adjustments, though. Blunt also had to warn her costar Chris Pine, with whom she has a dance scene in the film.
“When we did rehearsals, I was being kind of careful,” she recalled to Disney twenty-three. “By the time we shot, it was about two months later and I said to Chris Pine, ‘You need to add 15 pounds to what you felt before. When you dip me, you gotta get yourself in a deep lunge because there’s more weight coming down!'”
Those logistics aside, Blunt’s pregnancy turned out to be a boon for her during filming. “The fact that I was pregnant actually was a rather transporting thing, and a very helpful experience in a way to understanding the urgent need that this woman has for a baby,” she explained. “Here I was, feeling incredibly blessed and understanding what the character maybe is missing out on.”
The Golden Globe winner and her husband, actor John Krasinski, welcomed their first child, a baby girl named Hazel, back in February. “She was like…just perfect,” Blunt told Ellen DeGeneres a few months later.
