Emily Blunt: if the bad-girl shoe fits, wear it, baby!

In Pawel Pawlikowski's My Summer of Love, Emily Blunt plays Tamsin, a seductive, manipulative, rich teenager who befriends a fragile working-class girl during a stifling summer in the English countryside. The film maps the terrain of an intense--but ultimately doomed--relationship between two emotionally isolated girls who find solace in each other. Blunt slides into the role of Tamsin with a fierce sexuality and powerful intelligence--and it's her eyes, large blue pools of deceit, that are her most arresting feature. "I have sly eyes," says the 22-year-old Londoner, who started out performing on the stage, making her West End debut opposite Dame Judi Dench in a production of The Royal Family. "When I was in school they always said, 'Emily can never be elected Head Girl because you never know what she's thinking.'"

Blunt's performance in My Summer of Love won her the award for Most Promising Newcomer at last year's British Independent Film Awards as well as her next role in the upcoming thriller Irresistible, about a woman (played by Susan Sarandon) who believes her husband (Sam Neill) is being stolen away by his co-worker (Blunt). "Susan's character thinks I'm doing these things to her because of a lot of dangerous coincidences," says Blunt. But despite the fact that she's now taken on dark roles in back-to-back movies, the actress says that playing the femme fatale doesn't come naturally. "I'm quite an open person," she insists. "I'm not mysterious at all."

Sarah Wilson is an assistant editor at Interview.

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