By Gill Pringle
“I’m not beautiful, and I can’t have kids, so what does that make me? Worthless,” Rachel Watson – the deeply flawed character in Paula Hawkins’ smash novel, The Girl On The Train – describes herself. She’s also variously described as washed out, overweight, ugly, weird, and hopelessly alcoholic. In short, British beauty, Emily Blunt, is not the first actress that anyone would reasonably think of for the role. “Everybody moans about, ‘Oh, she’s too beautiful to play Rachel’ and she is,” Hawkins said at The Chiswick Book Festival in the United Kingdom a couple of weeks ago. “But the thing about Rachel, the key part of her, is her self-loathing and how bad she feels about herself. They’ve done their best to sort of make her look a bit shit, but you know…”
It’s in Hawkins’ analysis of her character that The Girl On The Train director, Tate Taylor (The Help), found his way to casting the seemingly unlikely Emily Blunt. “Despite the physical descriptions that Paula had for Rachel, the most important thing is that she hates herself,” the director reiterates. “She used to be attractive, but she’s let herself go. She was once a beautiful, sharp, intelligent woman in public relations. With my Rachel, you see Emily’s beauty, but she’s in a ten-year-old business suit, with no make-up, and is showing horrific signs of alcoholism in her complexion and her eyes. She’s let herself go. In many ways, just because she’s missing a few pounds from what people might see in the novel, you see a woman who has completely given up on herself. I’ve never cast on physicality; I cast for the best damned person to do the job. It’s really hard to have a character like Rachel be likeable and someone that you could root for, and that’s what I realised most that Emily would bring to it.”
And as Tate Taylor tells it, Emily Blunt wouldn’t likely have been able to bulk up for the role anyway. “We laughed,” the director explains. “She goes, ‘I guess I need to start getting fat.’ We were at lunch, and I said, ‘Something tells me that that’s not possible.’ She’s that damn person who can eat every three seconds… and she does. At the premiere in London, I sat down and saw this lady across the aisle, with huge glasses inhaling this huge hot dog. I looked closer and it was Emily. She had reading glasses on. I’m sure they were huge because they were stylish, McQueen or something, but she’d pre-arranged when the red carpet ended to have hot dogs and sodas waiting for her. That’s her. She’s like a 14-year-old girl. It wouldn’t have been possible for her to gain weight, even when she was pregnant. She had a baby three months ago…look at her!”
Yes, she might not be overweight, but Emily Blunt has been considerably dressed down for the role, though she’s hardly ugly. “I would come into work with no make-up, and they would make me look even worse,” Blunt smiles. “They would add rosacea and bags. I had full contact lenses that covered my whole eye for the really drunken stuff that gave the whites of my eye a bloodshot effect. They had different levels, like pink was a bit buzzed, and then raging drunk was a really red eye. But I love the contact lenses because it gives such a strange glassiness. People look scary. When they’re really drunk, there’s something in their eyes that is really crazy. And the rosacea. I had the most incredible make-up artist who pulled up mugshots of famous people to draw inspiration from. When people see the film, they will not have any concern that I look pretty.”
The Girl On The Train is released in cinemas on October 6.
