Emily Blunt Thought She Was About To Play James Bond & The Reason Why Is SO Fair

Are you feeling supercalifragilisticexpialidocious? It looks like Emily Blunt is thanks to the release of Mary Poppins only being a week away (finally). But I’m sure she’d be feeling extra… fragilistic if she were to have landed the role of a certain British spy that she thought she was getting before she got the call about Mary Poppins. Yes that’s right, Emily Blunt thought she could be portraying James Bond before getting asked to portray the magical nanny via an extremely important phone call.

Speaking to Phillip Schofield and Rochelle Humes on This Morning, Emily Blunt described the excitement of receiving the news about taking the reigns of such a beloved character. "Hilariously I think I was about to play a blackout drunk in Girl on the Train when I got approached about Mary Poppins," she told the presenters. "I was in Los Angeles and Rob Marshall [director of Mary Poppins Returns] called me and I knew there was something quite big coming down the pipe because it was such a charged voicemail that he left.

"Didn't ever think it would be Mary Poppins, but of course [I was] just completely overjoyed and overwhelmed," she added. Humes then commented on how that must have been one of the best phone calls Blunt had ever received, to which she replied: "It's like, 'either he's asking me to be James Bond or Mary Poppins.' I was just really shocked."

I would be delightfully shook if Blunt were to ever take the role of Bond, although an executive producer for the franchise denied the idea of a female spy back in October. "Bond is male. He's a male character. He was written as a male and I think he'll probably stay as a male," Barbara Broccoli said, as the Daily Mail reports. "And that's fine. We don't have to turn male characters into women. Let's just create more female characters and make the story fit those female characters."

While I agree with her sentiment there, it's not going to stop me from dreaming about Blunt or Gillian Anderson portraying the infamous secret agent.

Anyway, back to the beloved Poppins. Blunt shared some more insight into the process of filming Mary Poppins Returns, including the beauty of working with practical effects rather than computer generated — Poppins' umbrella is entirely animatronic, and Blunt was allowed to keep it (grr, jealous) — but it was the actor's experience with the legendary Dick Van Dyke that was one of her fondest memories on set. I'm warning you now, prepare those feels.

"He was so magical. We all just sat around him and just wanted him to tell us about the first film, and he was always dancing and entertaining the crew," she told Schofield and Humes.

"We were just having a moment where he sat there and there was a pause in the conversation and he just leant across and took my hand, and he goes: 'It's a jolly 'oliday with Maryyyy,' and I was like, 'You're gonna make me cry!' It was so special."

I'm totally going to have to emotionally prepare myself for this film, that's for sure.