How 'Mary Poppins Returns' star Emily Blunt and director Rob Marshall aimed to make a 'joybomb on the soul'
NEW YORK - The star and director of "Mary Poppins Returns" sit close together on a settee in a hotel suite high above Central Park, thick as thieves, and suddenly they're not Emily Blunt, Golden Globe-winning actress, and Rob Marshall, Hollywood's Oscar-nominated go-to musical man.
It's the "Em and Robbie" show.
There's an exceedingly warm mutual admiration and a shorthand between the pair after two films together, a rapport that first sparked years ago over lunch for a project that didn't pan out and blossomed when Blunt starred as the plucky baker's wife in Marshall's 2014 hit adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's "Into the Woods."
Marshall calls Blunt an old soul and "my favorite actress." She vows to lure him and his partner, John DeLuca, out of Manhattan and "convert them to Brooky-Brooks" - meaning Brooklyn, where she lives with husband John Krasinski.
The two are creatively simpatico, they say, which is a big part
