Emily Blunt: ‘I Shot Tom Dead So Many Times’

Emily Blunt insists that her new movie ‘Edge of Tomorrow’ isn’t just another Tom Cruise action film.

The English actress stars in Doug Liman’s latest blockbuster as a Special Forces warrior who teams up with Cruise’s character Cage in order to battle an alien race who have invaded Earth. Caught in a Groundhog Day-esque time loop, Cruise finds himself dying over and over again - often at the hands of Blunt’s character Rita - as he undergoes her brutal training regime.

[Emily Blunt took Tom Cruise to a sex club for Matt Damon's birthday]

“I shot Tom dead so many times,” the actress told The Telegraph. “He commits so hard to playing this character who is quite useless in the beginning. I just give him s**t all the time and he gets beaten up every day – by a chick.”

But while many of Hollywood’s leading men might balk at the idea of handing the action over to their female counterpart, Blunt revealed that Cruise was enthusiastic about subverting his own stereotype.

“We laughed a lot,” she said. “That’s the wonderful thing about Tom: he doesn’t take himself that seriously and he is very self-effacing. He couldn’t care less what people think about him – that’s quite refreshing.”

Blunt, who trained in Israeli martial art Krav Maga in preparation for the film, was also pleased by the collaborative atmosphere on Liman’s set.

“I was aware that it was going to be so challenging and so physically hard, and I was programmed into thinking it was going to be a bit ‘boys’ club’,” she explained. “But I’ve never been on a film as collaborative as this – everyone was so encouraging, and I was consistently emboldened to speak up and to disagree.”

[Tom Cruise plays a 'total coward' in Edge of Tomorrow]

Liman has also praised Cruise’s willingness to take a step back from his usual macho characters in the movie. Speaking at a post-screening Q&A earlier this year, the director laughed: “The amount of times he squeals in this movie – he's an amazing squealer! Other movie stars – in my experience – would have been more hesitant about being that vulnerable.

“He’s really the gutsiest most courageous actor I’ve ever worked with because he will try anything. The world has seen every single movie he has ever done. Now there’s the opportunity to come up with a character he’s never done, he’s never played before. He’s a total coward in this movie. Not just like in the beginning and he becomes a hero, but he is a coward all the way through.”

The director also showed a lot of love for his leading lady, adding: “She’s the only one we wanted. It’s one of those things where, if we couldn’t have gotten her, we didn’t have a Plan B. Emily is an extraordinarily powerful actress, she really stands her ground, even though she is in way over her head on this in terms of, like – Tom’s done big action movie and she hasn’t, that didn’t stop her at all.”

‘Edge of Tomorrow’ hits cinemas on 30th May, 2014.