Paging Ms. Poppins! Emily Blunt embodied her character entirely while filming Mary Poppins Returns by bringing her daughter Violet to set.
“I think she is [a real-life Mary Poppins] because she’s kind of astonishing,” the actress’ costar Ben Whishaw told Us Weekly at the Mary Poppins Returns premiere in Hollywood on Thursday, November 29. “She’d be sat there with her child Violet on her lap, feeding her.”
Blunt, 35, shares daughters Hazel, 4, and Violet, 2, with husband John Krasinski.
The 38-year-old actor continued: “All of the rest of us are exhausted and sort of moaning about everything, and she’d be there in the E-Z Up by the side of the studio and put her child aside, put it in the playpen with the nanny, and then she’d go and do this incredible … I find that kind of thing blows my mind. Yeah, I can only really do one thing at once, and even that’s a struggle.”
Blunt plays the titular role in the Disney film, which will be released on Wednesday, December 19. Whishaw and Emily Mortimer star as grown-up versions of Michael and Jane Banks, whom Mary Poppins comes back to check on after a personal tragedy. Lin-Manuel Miranda, Meryl Streep, Colin Firth, Angela Lansbury and original Mary Poppins cast member Dick Van Dyke also appear in the movie.
Krasinski gushed over his wife’s performance in an interview with Entertainment Weekly earlier this month. “Twenty-five minutes into the screening, which was just Emily and I, I stood up and walked out of the room, which of course, immediately communicates nothing but love to your partner that you’re walking out of the room,” the 39-year-old Jack Ryan star told the magazine. “And she said, ‘Oh, my God, you’ve never done that before. Do you want me to stop the movie?’ And I was just in the back at the concessions table and I just said, ‘No, I’m looking for napkins,’ because I just needed anything to stop crying and to blow my nose because I had blown through an entire box of tissues in 25 minutes.”
