I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about this before, but here we go again: I don’t really care about Mary Poppins. I didn’t have any feelings, good or bad, about the “sequel” to the original 1964 film, with Emily Blunt taking over the Poppins role made famous by Julie Andrews. If you want to see me heated and yelling, do a sequel to The Sound of Music. But Mary Poppins? Meh. Still, Vogue is here to help them promote the crap out of this sequel. While Emily Blunt – in character as Mary – covers the December issue of Vogue, the cover story isn’t a flat celebrity profile. It’s mostly about how the film came together, and there are extensive interviews with Rob Marshall (the director) and Lin-Manuel Miranda. You can read the full cover story here. Some highlights:

Emily on what she thinks Mary Poppins really is: “She’s a superhero. You could say she’s some sort of angel. She recognizes what people need, and she gives it to them, yet they discover something about themselves in the process. I don’t think she concerns herself with what she is. There’s nobody else like her—which she quite likes.”

She didn’t rewatch the 1964 film before she started: “I knew that if I watched Julie Andrews’s version, maybe I would take the edge off of what my instincts were telling me to do. Also, I didn’t want to be completely intimidated by the brilliance of her voice.”

She started preparing for the role while she was pregnant with Violet: She was in the process of finishing up The Girl on the Train, in which she played a depressive voyeur, and was also heavily pregnant with the second of her two daughters with Krasinski, Violet, who is now two. “It was medicinal, singing these happy Mary Poppins songs after what I’d been through every day,” she says. “Poor Violet; she’d been rattling around inside me while I played this alcoholic train wreck. But then I think she benefited from all the singing.”

They began filming just a few months after the 2016 presidential election & the Brexit vote: The unsettling outcomes of the Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. presidential election placed the making of the movie in a new perspective for its creators. “It took on a new poignancy because of how volatile the times felt,” Blunt says. “I remember Meryl commenting on that, saying that coming in to work took on much more depth once things really started becoming more incendiary out there.”

[From Vogue]

Emily tells Vogue that she basically refused to begin rehearsing or filming so soon after she’d given birth to Violet, and that she made Rob Marshall put rehearsals and production on hold until Violet was about four or five months old. They also talk about how Lin Manuel and Emily got to work with the songwriters and many of their songs are rather customized for Lin and Emily’s voices. Which is good, because while Emily *can* sing, she’s not a Julie Andrews-level singer and she needs some help. As for what Mary Poppins is, superhero or angel or mystical being… I have no idea. I always thought she was a sort of angel? But, like, a secular angel.

Here’s Emily’s 73 Questions feature – they did it in the Vogue offices, so it’s a throwback to The Devil Wears Prada.

Cover courtesy of Vogue.