It feels a little like Emily Blunt Month here in the United States, where the cheery British actress is popping up all over the place. She is on magazine covers, talk shows, red carpets – and, for now, sitting opposite me in a Manhattan hotel.

She has just flown in from Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband John Krasinksi (a fellow actor, he plays the Ricky Gervais role in the American version of The Office) for the premiere of The Adjustment Bureau, a new romantic thriller in which she stars with Matt Damon.

The once stammering actress has learnt to handle the demands of the promotional treadmill like a veteran. “When you’ve done it a few times it becomes less nerve-racking,” she says.

Now 28, Blunt made her film debut in 2004 in Pawel Pawlikowski’s dark coming of age tale, My Summer of Love, a daring performance that won her a British Independent Film Award for Most Promising Newcomer. She says it is the only one of her films she recommends people to see. It also happens to be the one in which she spends most time naked.

“I’m really proud of it,” she says. “It’s not like any other movie.” She thinks for a second and adds with a laugh, “I don’t know why I’m broadcasting my breasts to the world. It’s a bit worrying.”

Now there is The Adjustment Bureau, written and directed by first-time director George Nolfi. Based on a story by Philip K Dick, it asks whether we are in charge of our lives or whether unseen forces manipulate our destiny. Blunt plays Elise, a ballet dancer who falls for a charismatic politician (Damon) who is running for the US Senate. Agents of the shadowy Adjustment Bureau, led by Terence Stamp, are determined to keep them apart.

Nolfi had intended to cast a professional dancer in the role of Elise but, he says, “In one meeting Emily completely derailed my plans. I could tell immediately she was the one.”

Blunt was attracted by the script. “I’m not a fan of science fiction but Philip Dick does the sort of science fiction that feels close to home and creeps into your subconscious,” she says. “He targets that paranoia that we all live with. Are we being manipulated? Are we being watched? There’s something threatening about his science fiction that I really enjoy,” she says.

Her biggest challenge was achieving the precision and form of a dancer. “I had never danced in my life. I told George I’d work my arse off if he gave me the role but the training was unreal.

“I had eight weeks’ solid training before the movie and then throughout filming, anytime I could I was in the gym or the dance studio.”

In the past, in films such as 2008’s indie comedy Sunshine Cleaning, she has demonstrated that she is perfectly capable of pulling off an American accent. But, although the character of Elise was written as an American, in The Adjustment Bureau, she retains her English accent because Nolfi liked the way she speaks.

One of four children of an actress mother and barrister father, Emily was raised in Roehampton and began appearing in school plays because she discovered that acting helped her stammer. “I started stuttering when I was about seven and it started to get better when I was 14,” she recalls. “I found it very liberating to be someone else and talk in a different voice. It was miraculous how I never stuttered onstage, but if you’re a stutterer you always have it and I still have it – on the phone or if I’m really tired and trying to relate a story.”

A theatrical agent signed her when she was 16 and she went straight into the West End, appearing opposite Judi Dench in The Royal Family. In 2002 she played Juliet in Romeo and Juliet at the Chichester Festival.

After My Summer of Love and a Golden Globe win for her part in Stephen Poliakov’s TV drama Gideon’s Daughter, Blunt made her scene-stealing Hollywood debut in the role of the arrogant assistant to Meryl Streep’s fashion editor in The Devil Wears Prada.

“That role changed things in a huge way for me,” she says. “If you play such an off-the-wall character people see you can play a variety of roles. I never expected the reaction that film got.”

After that, she showed up briefly with Tom Hanks in Charlie Wilson’s War, co-starred with Steve Carell in Dan In Real Life and was the lead in The Young Victoria. Next month she will shoot Looper, a time-travel thriller set in New Orleans.

Through it all she has managed to remain down-to-earth, refusing to take her new Hollywood life too seriously. In fact, she still seems somewhat surprised at the turn her career has taken.

“I didn’t have a burning desire to act,” she says. “When I was three years I didn’t want to be an actress – I wanted to be the tooth fairy. So it is bizarre how it happened. But when it did I embraced it.”

Emily Blunt plays a ballerina who is forced to fight her own fate in her new film, “The Adjustment Bureau,” but in reality, the British beauty feels incredibly grateful for the way her destiny has played out.

“I look back with gratitude to a lot of stuff that’s happened [to me],” Emily told Access Hollywood at the junket for “The Adjustment Bureau” in New York City on Friday. “At the time it seemed awful and so upsetting, but when you look back you’re like, ‘Thank God I didn’t get into that school, because if I had gone to that school, I never would have got into drama, I’d never be here.’

“So I look back at those times that I remember as a teenager when I was reeling around the kitchen being like, ‘‘I’m a failure, I didn’t get into that school’, but it’s actually what led me here,” she added. “It all works out.”

The 27-year-old actress revealed she had only eight short weeks to learn how to dance for the role, but credits the extreme training for her killer Award-show-gown-ready physique.

“It definitely was daunting and there’s something uber-embarrassing about learning how to dance in front of people who can dance, and they’re looking at you going, ‘Wow, you really can’t dance,’ and that was a lot,” Emily told Access. “It’s very embarrassing, almost to do something physically that you are horrible at.

“And then as the weeks went on and I gathered confidence, it really was an extraordinary experience in the end to overcome something, and overcome your own insecurities, fears and pride,” she continued. “Suddenly you feel a dancer, and you start to look like one.”

However, earning her new lean bod came with a bit of a price – in the form of a few injuries.

“You get dropped, you bruise your knees, calves, and ankles,” Emily told Access. “I threw my back out; I threw my shoulder out…I got lots of massages!

“It was worth it, I guess, for [the result],” she added. “It was blood, sweat, and tears though.”

As for her handsome co-star, Matt Damon, Emily said working with the Academy Award-winner was nothing short of “amazing.”

“[Matt] is the worst guy ever,” Emily said, jokingly. “He’s actually Captain Delightful! He is the coolest guy and my friend and I just love him. He was amazing to work with and we laughed so hard and I think that really makes the experience.”

Emily wasn’t the only one who found Matt mesmerizing – his star power distracted the film’s background actors as well.

“Most of the time there was a guy on the loudspeaker yelling, ‘Do not look at Matt Damon!’ because all the extras were just staring at him,” she laughed. “When they meet Matt, he’s a massive movie star. I feel like I see people’s brains melting when they see him!”

See Emily and Matt on the big screen when “The Adjustment Bureau” opens on March 4.

Emily Blunt only took up acting as part of a therapeutic programme for her debilitating stutter, but film fans can be glad that it stuck – the acting, that is. She talks gnomes, superheroes and hamburgers with TARA BRADY

‘WE’RE GOING to have to strike that one from the record, I think,” says Emily Blunt, as she pulls her feet on to the couch to aid further contemplation and catlike curling. “In fact, please put some sort of qualifying marks around everything I’ve just said. ‘Emily Blunt says, rolling her eyes.’ That sort of thing.”

At 27, the divine, eminently sensible Blunt is not one for talking guff about her profession without a roll of the eyes. Indeed, not talking guff is very much her thing.

“I don’t really get it,” she continues. “Maybe sometimes I get a bit overexcited about a part, but I never think about it as craft. It’s an extraordinary job and I’m lucky to have it, but I have no reverence for it whatsoever. All that talk about acting as a process or a method makes me queasy. It’s not that I’m not grateful to get opportunities to explore the human experience. It’s just that that kind of terminology looks and sounds just awful. It is guff. I usually say ‘wank’ myself, but ‘guff’ is much better.”

She stops herself suddenly: “Ew. I said ‘human experience’, didn’t I? That’ll look pretentious in print.”

You’d never guess from the slacks and casual demeanour, but in less enlightened times Emily Blunt is precisely the sort of girl popular news-sheets used to call posh totty. She was born and raised in London’s leafy Roehampton, and her father is a criminal barrister and her Uncle Crispin a Tory MP.

There was, notwithstanding her fine pedigree, comparatively little sense of privilege or entitlement around Blunt the Younger. “A complete geek” by her own reckoning, she only agreed to acting lessons as part of a therapeutic programme for her debilitating stutter.

“I wanted to do modern languages at university,” she recalls. “I had an idea that I was going to be a very impressive sort of person. I hoped to be a translator at the UN or something. And then I just fell in to all this self-involved nonsense instead. I don’t mean to sound cavalier about my complete lack of burning ambition as an actress. I wouldn’t want to do anything else now. But it snuck up on me and took me by surprise. And once I was busy being someone else the stutter disappeared.”

There are no remaining traces of hindrance in her delivery, nor in her impressive roll call of screen credits. By 20 she had already amassed a sizeable collection of awards and laudatory notices for her work on the TV dramas Boudica and Henry VIII, and the sapphic indie crossover sensation, My Summer of Love .

There was more. In 2006 she appeared opposite Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway in the box-office smash The Devil Wears Prada and swiped the entire movie from under her celebrated co-stars’ noses.

“I was working for about four years before The Devil Wears Prada . It had Meryl Streep in it, so that was exciting, but I hadn’t really got as far as thinking that lots of people might go to see it or that lots of people might enjoy it. When it came out I got this phone call from my agent, literally crying with joy, telling me about the box-office figures. And I said ‘Oh, is that good?’ I had no idea. It was a huge springboard for me. To be part of a film like that is wonderful. I’m so grateful.”

She was grateful too, that the project allowed her a brief respite from the corset, a whalebone prison that has proved the undoing of a great many English roses.

“At one time I’d been stuck in so many corsets for so many roles, I used to fantasise about jeans at work. It really is a curse for British actresses. People like to stick us in corsets. I’m not saying ‘never’. When something like The Young Victoria comes along, of course I’ll say ‘yes’. But the one thing I don’t want to happen is to end up doing one thing.”

She needn’t worry. Over the coming weeks, as part of an unofficial celebratory month of all things Blunt, film fans can look forward to seeing her dashing alongside Matt Damon in The Adjustment Bureau and in a rather less flattering light as the romantic heroine of Gnomeo and Juliet, an animated garden-ornament adventure inspired by the songs of Elton John.

“It’s the most romantic story ever known, except with the most unromantic tacky objects ever known. It’s certainly a sturdier role for me. I feel and hope the film will bring about a resurgence for garden gnomes. They’ll be a must-have object among the fashionable classes.”

Away from her work as a chubby china action heroine, the Golden Globe-nominated performer has displayed little interest in the limelight. Last year she married John Krasinski (the star of the US version of The Office and her fiancé of three years) in an Italian ceremony so secret that even the paparazzi missed it.

“There might be one tiny little blurry shot out there on the internet. But our day was always going to be for us. There’s a place for cameras. I don’t think you should always turn your nose up at red carpets and awards ceremonies. It’s true that once you step out of the car everyone hates your dress and makes vomiting noises about your hair. But once you stop caring it’s fun to get dressed up and then go home to jeans and an In-N-Out Burger.”

An In-N-Out Burger? “It’s my favourite food in the world. I particularly like the orange gelatinous secret sauce. It’s so disgusting and gloopy you just know it’ll be delicious.”

In common with many women working in the sector, Blunt is less than impressed with the state of contemporary cinema. She has, in this spirit, turned down high-profile gigs such as Iron Man 2 to work on such heartfelt, rough-hewn gems as Sunshine Cleaning.

“Oh, I think that was because of scheduling conflicts,” she says with her tongue so far in her cheek it looks as though she’s slipped a boiled sweet in there.

What about Captain America? “Oh yes, I think I also had to turn that down due to scheduling conflicts,” she says. “I do worry it’s inevitable. It seems that superhero movies are the only kind of films we’re making any more. It makes me to sad to think about those ’70s Hollywood films. Where are they? You have to dig deep into the independent sector nowadays to find the kind of movies that women like Meryl Streep and Jane Fonda and Sissy Spacek were headlining 30 years ago.

“Films shouldn’t exist just to numb you and assault you with special effects and 3D. At any rate, I think I’d much rather hold out for the superhero part, not the girlfriend role.”