Emily Blunt’s UFO U-Turn: Research For Disclosure Day Turned Her Into A Believer

Emily Blunt dove into the UFO rabbit hole for Steven Spielberg's new sci-fi thriller 'Disclosure Day' and came out the other side a little more open to it all than she expected. Also: she fought off AI in one of the movie 's gnarliest scenes and did the nightmare noises herself. Priorities, and honestly, respect.

From curious to kind of convinced

On The Brandon Davis Show, Blunt talked about the prep that pulled her into real-world UFO territory. She burned through congressional hearings, documentaries, and docuseries about people who say they have seen things they cannot explain — UAP, if you prefer the modern label. What stuck with her was how steady and matter-of-fact many of those witnesses were. Some had been dismissed, discredited, even lost jobs, or been tagged as whistleblowers, and they still would not back off what they said they experienced.

She said a lot of them seemed oddly calm and full of wonder rather than frantic, which made her rethink how quickly we wave this stuff away. For Blunt, it stopped being about proving anything and became about staying open to the huge blank spots we still have about, well, everything — including where humanity actually fits in the universe.

She ditched AI for the meltdown scene — and made the sounds herself

On a recent episode of Hot Ones, Blunt explained why she refused to lean on AI for a pivotal sequence where her character, a TV weather broadcaster, starts coming apart on air and you hear something is very wrong before you fully see it.

'It is a four-minute oner that we shot that leads up to that moment where she is gradually sort of disintegrating. There are various ways you could do it. You could go the AI route, which I am a bit terrified of. I thought I could make some real, really strange sounds.'

Instead of generating it digitally, she and the team built it the old-fashioned way — performance first, then sound design. The nuts and bolts:

• Blunt recorded a grab bag of vocalizations herself: clicks, hums, specific breathing patterns, and warped consonant sounds.
• They planted microphones close to her mouth and throat to catch every uncomfortable detail.
• The production recorded it all live, then the sound designers enhanced and layered what she did, rather than creating the effect from scratch with AI.

The end result is a four-minute single take that escalates into something properly unsettling, built on human weirdness instead of algorithmic gloss.

What 'Disclosure Day' is chasing

Spielberg's film is a science-fiction thriller about how humanity responds when evidence of extraterrestrial life shows up. Getting ready for it pushed Blunt into the real-world accounts, testimonies, and investigations around unidentified aerial phenomena, and it clearly left a mark. She sounds less like someone out to settle a debate and more like someone comfortable living in the question — which also happens to be a useful headspace for a movie about first contact.

Curious where you land after all that — Blunt inching toward belief, AI sitting this one out, and Spielberg back in the extraterrestrial sandbox: you in, out, or waiting to be convinced?