Emily Blunt used to dread opening her mouth. The 27-year-old British actress developed a debilitating stutter at the age of 7. By the time she was 12, she was so embarrassed by her inability to put words together fluently that she all but stopped speaking. “It was absolutely awful,” she tells British Elle. “You feel like there’s an impostor living inside you who is misrepresenting who you really are. You don’t want to be accepted for being that person, but at the same time you do, and you don’t want people to finish your sentences, yet you breathe a sigh of relief when someone does.”
Blunt went for years barely speaking until a high school teacher suggested she act in a school play. “What if you speak in an accent?” her teacher suggested. Reluctantly, she tried it. “I spoke fluidly for the first time in my life in some northern English accent, probably the hokiest you’ve ever heard,” she recalls. Years later, she’s all but overcome the disorder, though she admits she has trouble sometimes when talking on the phone. “It’s very common for stutterers to not be able to say their own name, and when someone asks who’s calling, I’ll be like, ‘F--k!’”
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