Emily Blunt Is Taking A Break From Acting To Be With Her Kids

Emily Blunt is starring in one of the most highly anticipated films of the summer, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Throughout her career, she has consistently delivered incredible performance after incredible performance. And now she has decided it’s time to take a bit of a break. Because she’s ready to enjoy the last of the single-digit years with her two daughters, and we don’t blame her one bit.

Blunt, who shares 9-year-old daughter Hazel and 7-year-old daughter Violet with husband John Krasinski, spoke to the Table for Two podcast about her plans to take a year off from acting. “This year, I’m not working. I worked quite a bit last year and my oldest baby is 9, so we’re in the last year of single digits,” the Devil Wears Prada star told host Bruce Bozzi. “And I just feel [like] there are cornerstones to their day that are so important when they’re little. And it’s, ‘Will you wake me up? Will you take me to school? Will you pick me up? Will you put me to bed?’ And I just need to be there for all of them for a good stretch. And I just felt that in my bones.”

There’s also the fact that, as a mom, she finds that she is “very prone to guilt,” makes it even more difficult for her to be away from her kids to work. “I think maybe all mothers are,” Blunt explained on the podcast. “Prone to feeling bad for, God forbid, wanting something outside of being a mother.” She went on to say that she feels like ambition, or “dreams with purpose” as she called it, are incredibly important, as is setting an example of being passionate about her work for her daughters. Which she has done time and again, regardless of the fact that her daughters are “horrified” that she is an actress.

Blunt has made it clear that she does not want Hazel and Violet to follow in their parents’ footsteps in Hollywood as it is, telling Harper’s Bazaar UK this month. “My toes curl when people tell me, ‘My daughter wants to be an actress.’ I want to say, ‘don’t do it,’” she told the magazine, adding that her daughters “aren’t excited” to see their mother on a billboard but are excited “when I can pick them up from school and take them swimming.” Now she’s taking a break to do just that.