“It’s awful,” the actress says of executing action sequences in a corset.

Emily Blunt has danced across London, sung her way through the woods, and given birth silently during an alien invasion. But nothing tops having to do an action scene in a corset, which was a frequent occurrence on her new Prime Video series The English.

“It’s so awful,” she proclaims. “It’s so awful, especially because we shot in Spain in the summer and it was so breathtakingly hot. The corset acted as like a sort of oven on my organs. There was no breathing space.”

The Western drama from creator Hugo Blick (The Honourable Woman) stars Blunt as Lady Cornelia Locke, an aristocratic English woman who teams up with a Pawnee ex-cavalry scout, Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer) to cross the violent landscape of the American West in 1890.

As they journey closer to their destination of Hoxem, Wyoming, facing increasingly terrifying obstacles along the way, they edge closer to the truth of their intertwined history. In Hoxem, an investigation by local sheriff Robert Marshall (Stephen Rea) and young widow Martha Myers (Valerie Pachner) into a series of bizarre and macabre murders brings Cornelia and Eli face-to-face with their past and the future they must live.

Blunt also makes her debut as a producer on the project, which hits Prime Video on Nov. 11.

We talked with Blunt about why now was the time to take on a producing role, why she’s always been fascinated by Westerns, and why Cornelia Locke is her most personal role yet.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You have done so many different genres and types of stories. But this is your first Western. What made you want to play in that space?
I’ve always really loved the Western. It’s a very mythic story space, so you can get outside of a strict reality with it in some ways. You can do something really elevated, and it’s a world that’s built on power and identity and brutality. It’s this really mythic landscape, and so I’d always been excited about the idea of playing within that. This offered a cacophony of reasons why I wanted to do it. It was so beautiful when I read it; it was so piercing. And yet, it moved like a chase thriller.

Read the full interview/article in our press library.