Emily Blunt Doesn’t Like “Strong Female Leads”
Emily Blunt is sick and tired of “strong female characters,” too. In an article about the upcoming Western miniseries The English, The Telegraph talked to Blunt, who plays one of the two leads, about what drew her to the role, and surprisingly, she had this to say:
“I love a character with a secret. And I loved Cornelia’s buoyancy, her hopefulness, her guilelessness. It’s the worst thing ever when you open a script and read the words: ‘strong female lead’. That makes me roll my eyes – I’m already out. I’m bored. Those roles are written as incredibly stoic, you spend the whole time acting tough and saying tough things. Cornelia is more surprising than that. She’s innocent without being naive and that makes her a force to be reckoned with. She startles Eli out of his silence and their differences become irrelevant because they need each other to survive. I thought that was very cool.”
She’s right, of course. The phrase “strong female character” no longer means a three-dimensional, multi-faceted character but an indestructible superwoman who is always right and never suffers anything more traumatic than mansplaining. And the worst part is that it comes off as inauthentic; that’s because it’s being done to serve an agenda, not a story or character. Take Wonder Woman in the first Gal Gadot film, for example; she has many of these attributes, but it’s in service of her character, of learning the moral limits of her strength and finding her place in a world she wants to defend. Nowadays, that’s the exception; the norm is characters like Captain Marvel or She-Hulk, who care more about themselves than they’ll ever care about anyone else, and whose ultimate goal is making everyone see how great they are. A journey centered on the self can work, but it isn’t very compelling when the hero is already perfect.
Those kinds of roles – and most kinds of roles – require a strong character in the sense that they’re well-written, complex, flawed, learning, and growing. But if you look at the big movies of today, that’s not allowed; women can’t be anything less than perfect because to do otherwise would be an insult. It’s no wonder an actress like Blunt is looking to these off-the-beaten-path projects like The English (as she explains it). The action-adventure-thriller films she’s been in for the past decade are movies like Sicario, where she was extremely vulnerable and in over her head; Edge of Tomorrow, where she was a skilled soldier but also died a lot and needed to help Tom Cruise; The Girl on the Train, which I didn’t see, but if it’s at all close to the book (which I liked a lot), she’s far from perfect; and A Quiet Place, where she was a mother and wife scared for her family. Those roles wouldn’t be described as “strong female characters,” but they’re much better characters than any of the ones who qualify, women who have arcs and grow throughout their stories in one way or another. (To that end, Virginia and I talked a few years ago about the Bond Girls and how they’re much better characters than modern wokesters give them credit for being; you can read those in order by era here: Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, Brosnan, and Craig.)
Do you agree with Emily Blunt? Who are your favorite strong female characters, and why? Is Riri Williams going to change her mind? Let us know in the comments, and stick around Geeks + Gamers for more unacceptable opinions from breaking-the-ranks movie stars!
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