Emily Blunt has said she turned to accounts from people who claim to have experienced alien encounters while preparing for her part in Steven Spielberg’s upcoming sci-fi thriller Disclosure Day.
Emily Blunt tells us she studied real-life alien sightings for ‘DISCLOSURE DAY’.
“I just had nothing to springboard, to base [my character on] other than watching endless documentaries about people who have experienced something and the reality of what that felt like for them.” pic.twitter.com/slnK5EUjFz
— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) June 9, 2026
In an interview with DiscussingFilm, the British actor explained that the role pushed her into unfamiliar territory, as she could not draw on anything from her own life to understand what her character endures.
“I just had nothing to springboard, to base [my character on] other than watching endless documentaries about people who have experienced something and the reality of what that felt like for them,” she said.
The comments underline how seriously Blunt approached the more unusual demands of Disclosure Day, which brings Spielberg back to the alien-contact territory that has helped define parts of his career, from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial to War of the Worlds.
In the film, Blunt portrays Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City meteorologist whose ordinary life is upended after a strange extraterrestrial encounter. As Margaret begins to experience impossible changes, she becomes linked to a wider conspiracy involving hidden evidence of non-human life.
Disclosure Day is directed by Spielberg from a screenplay by David Koepp, based on a story by Spielberg. The pair have a long creative history together, with Koepp previously writing Jurassic Park, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
The film is due to open in UK cinemas on June 10, 2026, before arriving in US theaters on June 12, 2026. It is being released by Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment as one of the summer’s biggest original studio movies.
Blunt also recalled that she was not given the full picture of the story straight away, describing the way Spielberg introduced the project as deliberately limited at first.
“he’d only told us a few crumbs about it,”
“You didn’t get the bakery until you read it.”
Early responses to Disclosure Day have been divided, with some critics praising it as a return to classic Spielberg blockbuster mode and others arguing that its mix of conspiracy thriller, alien mystery and spiritual drama makes it uneven. Even among more mixed reactions, however, Blunt’s performance has repeatedly been highlighted as one of the film’s strongest elements.
The Guardian gave the movie four stars out of five, calling it
“never anything other than entertaining and grade-A fun”
and singling out Blunt’s turn as a
“really funny and hyperactive star performance.”
The same review also suggested the film could become a major highlight in her career, writing that she
“may yet be morphing into a female version of Tom Hanks”
Spielberg, 79, has assembled a notable ensemble for the film, adding to a career that includes classics such as Jaws, E.T., Jurassic Park and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Alongside Blunt, the cast includes Colin Firth, Euphoria star Colman Domingo, Challengers actor Josh O’Connor, Eve Hewson and Wyatt Russell. O’Connor appears as Daniel Kellner, a technology whistleblower who tries to reveal secret government material connected to extraterrestrial life, while Domingo plays Hugo Wakefield, a figure linked to the disclosure operation. Firth plays Noah Scanlon, a powerful antagonist trying to keep the truth concealed.
The premise also lands at a time when public interest in UFOs and UAPs has been renewed by government hearings, whistleblower claims and official discussions about unexplained aerial phenomena. Spielberg has leaned into that contemporary atmosphere while framing the film as a fictional blockbuster about truth, secrecy and whether humanity is ready for revelation.
Blunt acknowledged that the role carried a level of pressure, calling the character
“kaleidoscopic”
and saying she felt
“unnerved”
by the emotional and dramatic demands of the part, even while she was drawn to the challenge.
“These thematic, huge questions that we were kind of bound to ask ourselves by the end of it,” she said of the script’s ambitions.
For Blunt, the character could not be built using the usual points of comparison actors often rely on. With no direct real-world experience to mirror the situation, she instead studied the testimonies of people who genuinely believe they have lived through extraordinary alien encounters.
That preparation appears to have shaped a performance that critics are already describing as intense, unpredictable and central to the film’s emotional pull. For a Spielberg alien story built around secrecy and revelation, Blunt’s challenge was to make the impossible feel personal.