Emily Blunt described playing alcoholic divorcee Rachel Watson in 2016 thriller The Girl on the Train as emotionally frightening and a “nightmare” she was relieved to finish. The role mattered because it required her to portray addiction, self-loathing and unreliable memory in an unusually damaged female lead, rather than a conventional glamorous protagonist.

Adapted from Paula Hawkins’s 2015 bestseller, the film follows Rachel as she becomes entangled in a missing-person investigation after observing a seemingly perfect couple from a train. Blunt used prosthetics, contact lenses and a scene-by-scene scale of intoxication to show Rachel’s changing condition; the novel had spent 13 weeks at number one on the New York Times bestseller list.