Emily Blunt visited Jimmy Kimmel Live! in anticipation of the release of Mary Poppins Returns, in movie theatres December 19. The actor plays the titular nanny in the sequel to the original Mary Poppins, which starred Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke. Now, the Banks children are all grown up.
Blunt moved to London with her husband John Krasinski and their daughters for a year to shoot the movie musical. “John was writing A Quiet Place; while I was shooting this beautiful magical film, he was in the depths of hell,” she said. “I'd come home from work and be like 'I danced with penguins!' and he's like 'I killed a kid on page four.'”
Like the original, the new Mary Poppins Returns does include scenes featuring the live-action actors singing and dancing with animated characters (like penguins). “It’s all the hand-drawn animation, and they actually got these 90-year-old animators out of retirement,” Blunt revealed. “When you're doing those sequences, you're dancing with, like, a tennis ball or a very small dancer in a green-screen suit—like an adult dancer on his knees pretending to be a penguin.”Blunt says the movie was a magical experience and remembers when she first showed the trailer to her eldest daughter: “When I played the trailer for Hazel, completely impassive expression, she gave me nothing. She just said [deadpanning] ‘Play it again. Play it again. Play it again.’”