Emily Blunt just took home a cool $15 million for her role in Disclosure Day—hot off the back of a $12.5 million payday for reprising her role as Emily Charlton in The Devil Wears Prada 2. But she could have been earning a much more modest income had she pursued her original dream career.
That’s because growing up, Blunt didn’t want to be an actress at all. She had her sights set on a far less glamorous job: translation.
“Before I was going to be an actress, I wanted to work for the UN and be a Spanish translator,” she recently told BBC Radio 2.
“I’ve always loved languages,” Blunt added. “My mother is an incredible linguist, so I think I grew up being quite inspired by her.”
As well as inventing an entire alien language made up of creepy clicking noises and hums for her most recent role in Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi thriller Disclosure Day, she also had to learn Russian and Korean. And before that, Blunt learned how to talk about riverbeds and fishing in Mandarin for the 2011 rom-com Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.
And while we have gotten a taste of her flair for languages on the big screen, Spielberg, who was also in the interview, said out loud what everyone was thinking: “I’m glad you didn’t take that job.” And even Blunt agreed, “Me, too.”
As the BBC put it, in the caption of the interview: “We’re so glad we’re in the universe where Emily became an actress and not a Spanish translator for the UN.”
Instead of an $80 million net worth, Blunt could have been earning $80,000 as a translator
Had she become a translator, Blunt would have been on a much smaller $80,000+ salary; her job would be at risk of being replaced by AI; and the world would never have seen her Oscar-nominated performance in Oppenheimer.
In fact, research from Microsoft showed that interpreters and translators have a 98% overlap with AI—meaning the likes of ChatGPT and Copilot can already do the majority of the role’s tasks, placing it at the top of the list of the 40 jobs most exposed to AI.
Monthly rates for freelancers start at around $6,727, but vary slightly depending on where you live.
An expired job ad for an experienced English interpreter at the UN advertised a salary range between $131,084 and $171,644.
But there’s a catch: Blunt wouldn’t have been able to apply anyway.
The role required fluency in at least three languages—and Blunt, by her own admission, just about speaks Spanish.
“I was studying Spanish as one of my A levels, and then I was going to go and do a year in South America, and then by that point I was going to be fluent, and I was going to be the best translator ever,” she previously told Howard Stern.
Acting, she admitted, had barely crossed her mind. She had only started doing school plays to help manage her debilitating stutter. And it was because the head of drama at her school recruited her for his “bizarre” rock opera at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe that her life accidentally changed course in the summer of 2000.
His agent was in the audience—and walked out with a new client: Blunt.
“He took me on and said, ‘Do you want to do this? Is this something you want to do?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I hadn’t really thought about it as a career,’” Blunt recalled.
Still, she took him up on the offer, started auditioning after finishing school the following year, and the rest is history. Today, Blunt has racked up over 45 movies to her name and an estimated $80 million net worth to show for it.