The sound of silence has the power to terrify

Emily Blunt tells Georgia Humphreys about her role in must-see horror film A Quiet Place.

From first glance of the poster for A Quiet Place, it looks utterly terrifying. So, you might be surprised to hear its star, British actress Emily Blunt — whose husband John Krasinski directed and also stars in the film — isn’t normally a fan of horror films.

“John did his research and watched every horror film under the sun. I’m afraid he did it alone because I was like, ‘I do not need to see any of that!’” Blunt, 35, declares. “I would be traumatised... I don’t want to see a clown terrorising people. It’s not something I need to see.”

It’s not a genre Massachusetts-born Krasinski, 38, has always been comfortable with either, though.

“Now, I’m a huge horror fan, but I wasn’t always good with it — I was a scaredy-cat, I think is the technical term,” he quips. “It’s very odd that I would choose to do a movie like this.”

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The excitingly original thriller sees the Hollywood pair play Lee and Evelyn Abbott, a couple desperately trying to keep their children safe from monsters that hunt sound. Therefore, they are forced to navigate their entire lives in silence.

“We found with A Quiet Place, that it [horror] is the most incredible genre to create suspense and tension, and also to carve out new space for yourself within the genre,” suggests Blunt who, later this year, will star as Mary Poppins in the Disney sequel.

“You can create a film that’s really about family, and yet, you’ve got this heightened backdrop that really makes for great cinema.”

Smiley, 6ft 4in Krasinskicracks jokes as easily as you’d expect (he’s best known for his role in the US version of sitcom The Office).

But, discussing what drew him to A Quiet Place, the father-of-two — Hazel is four and Violet 23 months — takes on a more serious tone, revealing he saw it as a metaphor for parenthood. “Three weeks after Emily gave birth to our second daughter, I was an open nerve with tension and fear of keeping her alive and, ‘Was I a good enough person to be her dad?’,” he says. “All these big themes were in my head already. And then the first draft of the script comes in where, yes, it’s so scary and it’s so exciting and it’s so much fun, but I was blown away at how moved I was at the much smaller intimacy of a family, and trying to survive only relying on each other, and the idea of what extremes would you go to, to protect your kids?”

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The film is set in the near future, when the world has been all but ended by an apocalyptic event, and the Abbotts are amongst the few remaining survivors, living on a farm in the middle of the nowhere.

Because their daughter Regan (played by Millicent Simmonds, also deaf in real life) is deaf, the whole family knows sign language, and this helps them to stay safe. But the creatures can pop out in any place and at any time, as soon as they hear noise.

So there are some nail-bitingly traumatic scenes in the film — particularly involving the pregnant character played by Blunt, who also impressed in The Girl On The Train.

It was the idea of not having a lot of dialogue in the film that Krasinski was both most excited and most worried about ahead of directing his third feature.

“I knew that, if it worked, it would be what makes our movie special, but you have to trust that,” he admits. “And then I’d say, day two or three, I really started watching and, especially Emily doing scenes with the kids, you see the unbelievable power that’s coming from this raw emotion.”

Krasinski seems full of admiration for his wife of seven years, who he first met through a mutual friend back in 2008. However, he’s honest about the nerves he had before working with Blunt on screen for the first time. “I was nervous because we had developed our own process,” he notes. “Because we’re both in the same business, people think we have the same experience - we actually have very different experiences.

“And so it’s hard to take the, I don’t know, 15, 20-odd years of experience that I have, and around that for her too, and say, ‘I know what I’m doing, my ideas are better than yours’.

So how did Krasinksi overcome these concerns?

“The tack I took was basically, ‘Let’s treat this like our marriage — let’s be as honest as possible the entire time so that things don’t flare up past the conversation’.”

With the film receiving rave reviews from audiences and critics alike, the partnership on screen has clearly been a success.

“We just got on set and it was really fluid,” recalls Blunt fondly. “And fun, and collaborative — and just

exciting.”

A Quiet Place in cinemas now