Emily Blunt Talks 'Emotionally Exhausting' Struggle With Stuttering

I will deal with all of this and you will go to Calvin Klein. I'm sorry to have some prior commitment some hideous skirt convention you have to do it. That was of course Emily Blunt in the original devil wears Prada film which came out 20 years ago Craig just saw it the other day and since then she has taken Hollywood by storm from playing the iconic Mary Poppins to earning an Oscar nomination for Oppenheimer. Well today, Emily is here to talk about a very personal matter that she has dealt with her entire life believe it or not. Stuttering so also joining us board certified specialist Heather Grossman she's the executive director of the American Institute for stuttering where Emily serves on the board good morning to both of you. And we're going to get into this in detail in just a moment, we're just discussing before I just saw the first devil wears Prada a couple of weeks ago before we went to see the second one my wife made me watch you have to you have to you have to get has a you know having revisited the role and seeing what a huge success. Yeah, the sequel is that that must feel pretty good after 20 years people still care about this movie. Yeah, I mean I think it acts as a sort of nostalgia bank for people and it's there's a fever around it. I don't think any of us expected so it's quite wild. Yeah, yeah, but for the reason you're here yes, this week is actually national stuttering awareness week. And this is something I didn't know you dealt with for I mean pretty much your whole life, yeah, us about your journey. So I mean I've learned a lot more since working with Heather and everyone at the American Institute of stuttering but it was something I struggled with severely when I was a child. It's still something that I contend with under certain environments moments of stress fatigue pressure. It's neurological biological is often hereditary it runs very prominently in my family, so my uncle my cousin, my grandfather. And as a child, you know you you don't understand why you can't speak, you know exactly what you want to say you would love to read your poem out in class and you just find ways to avoid speaking. And that kind of disfluency is usually really misunderstood by people and misidentified as other things so yeah, it's still something that I contend with I contend with it when I say my own name because you can't substitute your name for other words you'll find stutterers will often go through this elaborate mental and verbal gymnastics of substituting other words constantly if you feel one coming up that's going to knock you. Yeah, you know Emily that when the reality is they've been a number of wildly successful people who have dealt with this including a former president of the United States recently. There are to Emily's point there are a number of misconceptions about stuttering you guys have released 2 PSA so far what what are some of the misconceptions, what are some of the things that people don't understand about stutter. Many people think that only little children stutter, you know, and many as you said many successful adults continue to stutter. People stutter unfortunately are thought of. What they're trying to say or they're nervous. The worst part about it is I think that it's sort of like low hanging fruit for people to mock. You know when you think about it when you watch television. No one would ever laugh at someone with a disability yet when you see someone on television stuttering everyone just starts laughing, you're right so it's this misconception that that that that's OK to laugh at people who stutter and I think part of that is that people assume that if you worked hard enough at it you would get over it, you know that there's some magical speech mechanical thing that you can do to get over it and it's just not true. You know for many people they work very very hard and their physiology continues to stutter into adulthood. And we need to accept that and give them support. Emily are there still situations that maybe cause this to give you more more difficulty than others and finding different ways to still overcome this. Yeah, I mean I struggle. If I'm calling someone and I have to say my name on the phone and that worries me still I just panic I it can take me a while to say my name because you can substitute can substitute your name, it is still the universal thing that all starters deal with is they struggle with that name. I think if I'm really tired or if I'm feeling stress and leading up to a movie, I'm usually in this sort of elsewhere state of nerves, you know before I started and I can I notice my fluency is like most people wouldn't notice, but I I can feel it seems mentally exhausting to have to think about it all the time. I I don't know if I know any other way because I think of always spoken like this. I probably don't know how much I'm substituting other words from the time I think it's emotionally exhausting. I think that I think that we all want to show who we are and I think that's the entrapment of it is that you feel like this is sort of imposter in your body that misrepresents who you really are and it's it's really frustrating and there's a helplessness that people can feel in a loneliness and people just avoid and they start shutting down and they just don't speak. Emily, thank you thank you for shedding light on this. That certainly I'm sure there's there are folks who are watching right now, especially younger folks who you take solace in that well there is help you know there is incredible help that you can get at the American Institute of stuttering where it's a lot about emboldening you emotionally to accept that this is not all of you this is just a part of you and we've all got something and this was my thing and we we've all got some got some and for many of us more than one thing. And the treatment of centering is very different than the treatment of other speech language conditions that we see so many people really do need to find someone who specializes in thank you so thank you so we're going to put more on today dot com you can find out more about the American Institute for stutterings campaign.