Emily Blunt is three days out from her biggest summer release yet, and it turns out the preparation for it sent her down a rabbit hole she wasn’t quite ready for.
With Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day hitting theaters June 12, the promotional run is in full swing. Blunt has been making the rounds, and in a new interview with Discussing Film, she opened up about just how much homework went into playing meteorologist Margaret Fairchild, a woman who becomes an unwitting conduit for alien communication in the middle of a live weather broadcast. The role is unlike anything Blunt has tackled before, and she knew it from day one.
Emily Blunt Studied Real-Life Alien Sightings to Build Her Disclosure Day Character
With no conventional dramatic touchstone to draw from, Blunt leaned into the real world instead. “I just had nothing to springboard, to base [my character on] other than watching endless documentaries about people who have experienced something and the reality of what that felt like for them,” she said.
That deep dive clearly left a mark. In a separate appearance on the TODAY show alongside Spielberg, Josh O’Connor, and Colman Domingo, Blunt admitted the prep work shifted something in her. “I felt my opinion had been changed even in prepping this movie,” she said. “I had never gone down the rabbit hole of looking at every congressional hearing that’s taken place, every documentary, docuseries, everyone who has had a genuine experience. I became invested in them, in the people who had had these experiences.”
It is the kind of character research that goes well beyond script analysis, and it shows in what critics are calling her most accomplished screen performance to date. Margaret Fairchild is, as Blunt herself described in an earlier featurette, “the full weather system of a character” — someone unpredictable, way over her head, and carrying a strange restlessness long before the film’s extraordinary events find her. “She’s walked through life with itchy fingertips,” Blunt told Empire. “She has this sense that she doesn’t belong where she is right now.”
The timing of the film makes that research feel especially loaded. Just weeks before release, the Department of War published a new tranche of declassified UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) records, with fans already drawing lines between those real-world document drops and the government conspiracy at the heart of Disclosure Day. Spielberg, for his part, has been candid about his own shifting beliefs. “I’m much more inclined now than I was when I made Close Encounters to really believe that we’re not the only intelligent civilization in the universe,” he said in the film’s final trailer.
Blunt joining the project was the catalyst that got the whole thing moving. She was the first actor cast, back in June 2024, before most of the ensemble including O’Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, and Colman Domingo came aboard. The script, written by David Koepp from a story by Spielberg, is already drawing early praise as one of the best things either man has produced.
Disclosure Day opens in theaters and IMAX worldwide on June 12, 2026.
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