Emily Blunt: I'm really careful about what I say after Donald Trump joke got me into trouble

Emily Blunt admits she is now “really careful” about what she says after she faced calls to leave America for making a quip about Donald Trump.

The actress, who was born in Roehampton, joked in a 2015 video interview that she feared she had made a “terrible mistake” by taking US citizenship after watching Mr Trump in a Republican primary debate.

The remark, which she later apologised for and described as an “offhand joke”, was criticised by a presenter on Right-wing TV show Fox And Friends, who said: “Why don’t you leave Hollywood, California, and let some American women take on the roles you’re getting?”

Blunt, 35, who now lives in Brooklyn with her husband, director and actor John Krasinski, and children Hazel, four, and Violet, one, told ES Magazine the incident had had a lasting effect. She said: “It was a fairly innocuous joke because, you know, where I’m from we poke fun at our public figures.

“I think I wasn’t quite American enough to be able to say that. I have to be really careful now. Certain subjects, I just can’t. Because I’m also someone who loathes getting in trouble. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loathed getting in trouble.”

But Blunt, who is due to star as Mary Poppins in a sequel out later this year, did disclose that she is against Brexit — unlike her uncle, Tory MP Crispin Blunt, who backed the Leave campaign in 2016’s referendum.

“I think it’s really sad. I’m really bummed about it,” she says. “I just think that, ‘Globalisation is here guys, come on!’ It is an interesting time in the world because it’s fragile, because it feels unsafe. It’s become this sort of ‘each to their own’ mentality and you feel it. You feel people becoming more guarded, and more in the need to protect. It’s sad.” She said her next project, forthcoming horror film A Quiet Place, felt more personal than her previous roles, which have ranged from a soldier in Edge Of Tomorrow to a hard-nosed magazine assistant in The Devil Wears Prada.

Blunt and husband Krasinski, who also directs, play a married couple in a post-apocalyptic world where creatures hunt humans by sound — forcing people to live in silence.

She said: “The idea of not being able to protect your kids from something — that is so real to me. This was more personal than anything else I’d done and I was absolutely wiped out by it.

“I actually never approach emotional scenes like that. My process has never been to go, ‘Well, I’m gonna think about Hazel and Violet’. But I think any mother would empathise so deeply because it would be your worst nightmare.”

On working with Krasinski, she added: “We’ve always wanted to work together and when this came along I realised the concept was so much bigger than, ‘They’re a married couple’. We were nervous because we’ve always been the second-hand audience to the rehashing of what we might have gone through that day on set. And ultimately we really understand each other’s worlds because it’s the same world.”