To people with a certain view of Queen Victoria – “that she was this old lady who waddled around looking depressed,” as someone once said – it’s an eye-opener to meet Emily Blunt. The fine-boned English actress, who plays the queen in the new movie The Young Victoria, is not only young, thin and beautiful; she is assuredly not waddling and, furthermore, she is laughing hysterically at something one of her assistants has just said.That is not much like Victoria, the monarch who was famously not amused, but Blunt’s version is a woman not many people knew: “a vivacious, feisty girl who loved to laugh and eat and to dance,” in the words of the actress (who is also, by the way, responsible for the “old lady who waddled” characterization).
The Young Victoria is set in the years before the queen went into permanent mourning over the death of her beloved husband Albert. The movie, directed by Canadian Jean-Marc Vallee (C.R.A.Z.Y.), follows the teenage Victoria as she breaks clear of an overbearing mother (Miranda Richardson) and falls in love with her cousin Albert (Rupert Friend). A combination of romance and court intrigue, it features sumptuous costumes, stunning sets and a more intimate atmosphere than most costume epics.
It was a role that Blunt went after the minute she read the script by Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park).
“I was aware that there were surely bigger names involved, and I said that I didn’t really care and that I would love to do it and I would love for them to give me a shot,” Blunt, 26, recalled. “It was a bit demanding, and that was something that could be royal, I suppose.”
The connection between the actress – whose own sense of regal command was also evident in her role as the neurotic assistant in The Devil Wears Prada – and a queen-in-waiting is easy to translate into Hollywood terms.“I don’t know what it’s like to be queen, but I could relate to the girl, and Julian Fellowes had really captured that intimate portrait of the girl who felt completely overwhelmed by her job and she was in love, and she had difficult relationships with her mother, and didn’t know where she was and who she was, and I think that’s something a lot of people can relate to,” Blunt said, in something of a precisely worded rush.
“So I was really intrigued by a period film that dealt with the public persona of what it is to be queen and how much of a performance that is, and then you see her in private and you see the tears and the fights, and you see her let the guard down and falling back on the chair, rather than having being poised all the time. I love the dual existence that that revealed.”
Of course, that idea of living two lives is the stock-in-trade of an actress.
“I think there’s a certain amount of performance that goes on, because you have to keep something for yourself,” Blunt acknowledged. “You have to keep a lot for yourself, actually. There’s certain sacrifices that come from the job, but you have to make a choice not to see them as that. . . . Everyone has a bad day, and sometimes you want to have a bad day. Privately, I can.”
Today, however, seems to be a good day. The Young Victoria was about to open at the Toronto Film Festival to good reviews, and Blunt – who already has a Golden Globe Award for her role in the TV drama Gideon’s Daughter and a nomination for her Prada performance – is at the beginning of an exploding career. Next year, she co-stars in The Wolfman with Anthony Hopkins and Benicio Del Toro, has the lead in an adaptation of Gulliver’s Travels opposite Jack Black, and plays the female lead opposite Matt Damon in the political thriller Adjustment Bureau.
By comparison, a costume drama about a dead queen seems tame. But for Blunt, Victoria is a fascinating character study of a woman she knew only as someone “old and grisly-looking and sexually repressed and all those things.” Reading books and her diaries, she found a woman who developed a quiet steeliness to withstand a childhood that was both oppressive and stage-managed.
“Finding out at 11 that you’re going to be queen – apparently, she cried all night, just had a complete meltdown, and woke up the next morning and said, ‘I will be good,’ ” Blunt said.
Victoria’s only outlets were theatre and opera, where she saw the displays of love and music that she craved. “That’s why, as soon as she became queen, she said, ‘That’s what I want and that’s what I want in a man, and I’m not marrying anyone you tell me to.’ ” Instead, she found Albert.
The Young Victoria was produced by Sarah Ferguson, who has some experience in the feeling of being an outsider at court. But in Vallee, it has a director – a Quebec filmmaker whose previous movie was a 2005 drama about a dysfunctional middle-class family – from even further outside.
“He had a really rock-star approach to it,” said Blunt. “He looked at the whole period with fresh eyes, without the reverence I’m sure a British director might have looked at it.” For his part, Vallee said The Young Victoria and C.R.A.Z.Y. are both family dramas: He compared a scene when the Montreal father screams at his family during a Christmas dinner to a scene where King William (Jim Broadbent) disrupts a royal ball to shout at Victoria’s mother.
“See the similarities?” Vallee asked. “It’s beautiful. It’s family.”
The danger in something like The Young Victoria is that it can become physically and emotionally corseted. Blunt says she enjoys wearing costumes, because they help her get into character, but they can be too constrictive.
“They’re very transporting, and then your kidneys start to cry and you know it’s time to call it a day,” she said. But she said the movie went beyond the usual costume drama.
“This film needed everyone to be a bit brave and step slightly outside the box, so we didn’t conform to the cliches that people expect,” she said. “We had a certain freedom within that, to make it real. What really happens when people fall in love? What really happens when someone dies, or when people turn against you? How do you really react?”
She hopes the movie awakens a new sense of Victoria, beyond the vision of an old lady who waddled.
“I think that it says a lot about strong women, and I think the film also shows a remarkable sense of commitment in a relationship, and I think that’s important to see. People quit on everything so quickly, and they didn’t. Yes, relationships can be hard and people have to wear a helmet, but there’s perseverance in their love, and I think that’s really important for young people to see: that you must try to be more resilient and persevere.”
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Julia Szabo
A PUG. Yes Queen Victoria owned MANY Pugs. 
