Emily Blunt ‘Bored’ of the ‘Strong Female Lead’: ‘Worst Thing Ever’

Actress Emily Blunt sent the hardcore feminists into a tailspin on Tuesday when she admitted to being “bored” with the much-ballyhooed “strong female lead.”

Blunt issued her frank remarks about the woke character descriptor during an interview with The Telegraph, calling it the “worst thing ever.”

“It’s the worst thing ever when you open a script and read the words ‘strong female lead,’” Blunt said. “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.”

While Blunt has indeed played a fair amount of impressive heroines throughout her career, they often do not fit into the box of what feminists might consider “strong.” In Looper, for instance, she played a single mom whose love for her troubled son saves him from embracing a path of darkness; in A Quiet Place, she played a matriarchal mother bear fighting to keep her family together through an alien apocalypse. Her latest character in the Western revenge series The English, in which she plays a frontier woman avenging her son’s death, reportedly follows similar tropes.

“She’s innocent without being naive and that makes her a force to be reckoned with,” Blunt said of her character in The English.

“I love a character with a secret,” Blunt added. “And I loved Cornelia’s buoyancy, her hopefulness, her guilelessness…”

Blunt is hardly the first actress to call out this condescending trope, which ultimately reduces female characters to a one-note attitude rather than a flesh-and-blood individual. Speaking with The Guardian in August, actress Tatiana Maslany of She-Hulk fame called the trope “frustrating.”

“It’s reductive,” Maslany said. “It’s just as much a shaving off of all the nuances, and just as much of a trope. It’s a box that nobody fits into. Even the phrase is frustrating. It’s as if we’re supposed to be grateful that we get to be that.”

Academy Award-winning actress and screenwriter Emma Thompson also previously criticized the prevailing trend in movies of making women act like men.

Speaking on CultureBlast podcast in 2020, the former Love Actually star said that it’s not “good enough” to simply give a woman a gun and have her act like a man, even going so far as to say that movies should utilize a women’s feminity as a source of her heroism.

“So all the women screenwriters I talk to, I say, ‘Well, what’s the story?’ Because it’s not good enough simply to give the women the guns, and then make the women badass, as well,” said Thompson. “Now women have to be badass — if they’re feminine in the way that they used to be, and they’re not badass, then they’re not welcome. Also, they’re not allowed to cry, apparently, anymore, because we’ve just got to be like the men.”

Thompson said that screenwriters and directors need to explore the feminine to find the heroism inherent with it, such as giving birth.

“And I remember thinking, ‘Well, that’s not what we meant,’” the actress continued. “When I got a group of women together in my thirties, and I said, ‘Okay, what’s the female heroine? Who is that? What does she do?’ Because she hasn’t got the wherewithal to do the Superman, to do the Godfather, that’s not the point. That’s not where our heroism lies. So how do we make it heroic?”