Emily Blunt is relieved she didn’t join Marvel as Black Widow (exclusive)

Married couple John Krasinski and Emily Blunt are getting ready to set the box office alight with their insanely tense (and brilliantly original) horror film, A Quiet Place, which is in cinemas this weekend.

The movie, which imagines a post-apocalyptic world in which noise-hunting monsters attack anything that makes a sound, marks the first time the real-life couple have appeared in a film together.

But it could have all have been so different – Krasinski auditioned for Captain America, and Emily Blunt for Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson took the part after scheduling conflicts with Gulliver’s Travels prevented Blunt from doing Iron Man 2), if they had played those parts they would have made several films together in the MCU.

With hindsight, are they relieved they didn’t get those roles?

“Yes,” Emily Blunt says. “I don’t think I would have been able to do a lot of projects that I’ve loved doing. I think that was a nerve-wracking prospect for me to not be able to choose, and the choices I have are often all I have, so you can’t really plan for anything else.

“You can’t predict what’s going to happen, what’s going to catch fire and what’s not, so if I make the choice for me, and not because I’m contracted I think that’s an exciting prospect.”

“That’s really interesting,” Krasinski says. “I think A Quiet Place definitely wouldn’t exist. There are benefits, and Chris Evans seems to be having a wonderful time. I love Chris, I’ve been a friend of his for a while. Those movies are so much fun and I love watching them, I tell him I’m first in line to see his new movies.

“It’s that zen thing of let life take you where it may and I never would have been here if I had gotten Captain America. I never thought about that, you just broke my brain.”

But was it weird for them to The Winter Soldier, a film they could have led together? “Again, I never thought about it and now I’m ‘Oh my god, we could have been in that movie together instead of this!'”

“No, this movie, working with her, I don’t think I’ve ever had a better collaboration. We’ve always talked about working together, but we didn’t want the story of our marriage to supercede the story being told.

“This one’s pretty out there, so we were safe. But more than that, I think being married in this movie really helped us specifically, not just because it’s a cool thing to work together, it was this idea of spouses having a secret language, and in this movie, it’s the only language you can use.”

A Quiet Place is out now.

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