Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer's Western Union

A monologue that aches with longing opens Prime Video's The English — an eye-popping, heart-stopping revenge Western — and its mix of love and violence whipsaws throughout the six-episode series.

As the camera lands on a series of neatly arranged hints at what's to come — a picture, a compass, a knife, an arrow, a gun — we hear a woman's voice:

"Without you, I'd have been killed right at the start.
That's how we met. That's why we met. It was in the
stars. And we believed in the stars, you and I."

We're listening to Lady Cornelia Locke (Emily Blunt) recalling her time with Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), a Native American man she met years before. She then uses a Pawnee term he taught her, which is translated onscreen:

"I cherish you."

"I'm covered in goosebumps every time I hear that line," says Blunt (A Quiet Place, Mary Poppins Returns). "That's what completely arrested me about the series, that it moves at the pace of this propulsive chase thriller, and yet at the core it's the tenderest and most surprising of love stories. I had never read anything that felt so epic and so intimate at the same time."

Eli, an ex-cavalry scout, is on a mission to claim land due him as a serviceman, but sure to be denied him as a Pawnee. Cornelia has come to the States to avenge the murder of her son. Their first encounter is shot through with menace as well as a deep, shared need for closure, Spencer notes. "That's what's connecting them — the pain."

He and Blunt speak separately via Zoom from Georgia. Spencer (The Twilight Saga, Wild Indian) is in Atlanta, filming Echo for Disney+, while she is in Savannah, shooting the Netflix film Pain Hustlers, "a tale about American greed" as she puts it, set against the backdrop of the opioid crisis.

American greed also permeates The English, the limited series from British writer-director Hugo Blick that will drop all of its episodes on November 11. Set primarily in 1890, the series "obviously offers a more mythic story space," Blunt allows, "but it has this theme of power and race and people jumping over each others' backs to steal land."

Blunt had been looking for a longform project for some time, "and this just kidnapped me," she says. "I read the first speech, and I was like, 'I'm in.'" She signed on after reading the pilot, "and I was sitting on my hands waiting for each script."

Blick — whose many honors include three Emmy nominations for 2015's The Honourable Woman — had no one else in mind for the role, he says via email while vacationing in Wales. "Something about Emily's personal and enduring commitment to the U.S., I understood and share. We also retain an outsider's perspective." (Both are British; Blunt, now a dual citilizen, lives in Brooklyn.)

As Cornelia and Eli make their way through perilous terrain, she is fearless and foolhardy, proving as capable of violence as he.

"She lives beyond the constraints of her gender and of that time," Blunt says of her character. "You have to admire her guts, and wonder where she's going and why she's going there. There's a modernity to the way Hugo writes — he never makes too important of a point that these two are outliers who completely fall for each other. Outside of the prejudicial social norms, it's not touched upon, and that was so exciting to me too, to have a Native American be [a leading man like] Paul Newman. I hadn't seen that, ever."

Before putting pen to paper, Blick thought about the story for decades, after an eventful time spent in the America West.

Sent from England to Montana at age eighteen, he lived with a family friend — a U.S. Air Force colonel, Olympic gold medalist in rowing and avid outdoorsman. "He taught me how to hunt, shoot and spin a horse," Blick recalls. "We also cut wood commercially. Our contracts came from the government to supply those most in need. Sometimes this involved Native communities.

"We made a hunting buddy I called Chief. He wasn't a chief. He called me English. We were easy with this casual racism, but pretty soon I got to see it was a one-way street — with all the heavy traffic heading his way.

"Montana winters are severe. I had never seen such difficulties. Then one day he took off, leaving a couple of bags with us for when he came back. He didn't. Nothing to come back for. I never knew his real name, nor he mine. I regretted that. This was a kernel for The English."

Once he'd decided to write The English, Blick dove into research and sent each script to Crystal Echo Hawk, CEO of the Native-led racial and social justice organization IllumiNative. "She then introduced me to representatives of the Pawnee and Cheyenne Nations, each of whom are specialists in the cultural and military history of their respective nations," he says, noting that they advised him further.

The show's dialogue is spare and lyrical. "These were slim scripts, made even slimmer in the edit," Blick says. "Whenever I could, I honed them down. The key to the story's rhythm is in the character of Eli."

Spencer commanded the role the minute he walked into his audition, Blunt recalls. "Chaske has an ability to change the air in the room, and that's really fun to play with. I knew that there was so much about how he played Eli that Cornelia would fall deeply in love with, because he's magical, and it's then very easy to create that chemistry."

As for Blick, he was moved by Spencer's stillness, "and a voice that spoke to the break in Eli's heart." But Spencer demurs that he had to work hard to find that stillness. "For a character like this, the challenge was not to do too much," he says. "A lot of the work I did was inward, and as an actor, I've never played a character like that."

Blick supplied extensive research materials, so "I had the Pawnee stuff down," Spencer says. "But that could only take me so far." (A member of the Fort Peck tribe, his heritage includes Lakota Sioux, Nez Perce, Cherokee, Creek, "and I think I'm a little Dutch and French too," he notes.)

"To help me modernize it, I pictured Eli as a biker who's a Vietnam vet. He has done violent things and has had violent things done to him. He has gone through a lot of trauma. And, like vets who aren't expressing their emotions too much, he's not going to be an open book, so you have to keep it internal."

He started each morning listening to Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A.," he says, noting that it's "a song about a Vietnam veteran who returns home and has a hard time adjusting to the world, and also a country that makes him feel ashamed for his activities in the war."

Eli initially sees Cornelia as a burden to bear only as long as he must. But as their relationship progresses, his walls start to come down. "There's some type of light in her that helps him heal throughout the journey of the series," Spencer observes.

Having landed the role right before the pandemic lockdown in 2020, Spencer had more than a year for preparation, which included horseback-riding lessons. The shoot took place from May to September 2021 in remote locations in Spain, and he arrived a month early for stunt and weapons training. Visual elements added more pieces to Eli's puzzle.

"He has the mohawk, the army jacket, the shaved head, the gun, the earrings — it's a lot," Spencer says, and it gave him a lot to work with. The heat and dust contributed another layer of realism to his portrayal.

Nevertheless, he was "quite nervous" when filming began. "I've been a working actor for quite some time, but this is a big role. And I have to say, Emily was very good at calming me down. Just working with her, and having the confidence of my scene partner, helped me. She's such a phenomenal actor, and a very genuine, good person. The way she works has an ease to it, and that helped me to ease into this character as well."

And how does Blunt assess her leading man? "He's a big old movie star who's about to explode onto the scene," she says. "He's so disarmingly sweet and unspoiled and enthusiastic and generous-hearted; he's like a puppy.

"When he switched over in the role, it was the most mesmerizing thing to watch — this containment that he had, like one of those old matinee idols we haven't seen for a while, where there was such trust and such resonance in doing very little. It was the most arresting thing.

"And that's what we needed, because even though Eli's lethal — and he should be lethal, and you should be scared of him, and what he's capable of — we need to love him. Chaske's natural exuberance and warmth glimmers through, and it's what's so beautiful about the performance."

Both actors credit creator–writer–executive producer Blick for what Spencer calls his "gentle-souled" direction on every episode. "He wrote it, so he knows exactly what he wants," Spencer says. "And he's very good at handling actors because he is one." (Blick has ten roles to his name, ranging from 1989's Batman to his own 2018 series Black Earth Rising.)

Blunt praises Blick's patience, noting that he wouldn't make any suggestions on a scene until take three: "He usually said that any notes he had on the first take would have resolved themselves by the third take.

"There was such freedom on set," she continues. "Hugo was curious as to what your take would be, so that would fill you with confidence to try anything — and I am someone who needs to throw the kitchen sink at it. He's not a control freak, and that was really cool, and unusual for a writer–director."

She then clarifies that her husband, writer–director John Krasinski, is also not a control freak.

Speaking of whom, Blunt adds that Krasinski has long suggested she ask for a producing credit on her projects, "because when I love something, you will have all of me on it. So with that comes spirited opinions, which will hopefully lead the project to a really cool place." In this case, she was invited on as an executive producer without having to ask.

"I don't think I've ever loved a character more deeply than this one," Blunt says. "She's completely rare. I was floored by the guts and how the empathy reigns supreme, even after suffering the heart-stopping loss that she has. And the future that awaits her is a frightening one, also. I was like, 'God, I'd like to be like you.'" Blunt says that last line with the same ache that permeates her opening monologue.

The show's tone mixes that yearning with foreboding, pastoral moments and violent action, almost matter-of-factly. "It is this amalgamation of the wild and the bonkers meets this frank, lean poetry," Blunt says. "It's really hard to sum up. And yet you are completely transported into a world; it knows what it is."

It is also deeply creepy. "And it gets much creepier," she warns.

A dinner scene involving would-be bull testicles (or prairie oysters, as they're more delicately known) drove her and scene partner Ciarán Hinds to hysterics (they were eating gelatinous imitations). "Him trying to swallow one of those things was one of the funniest things I've ever seen, and I had to watch him do it again and again because we couldn't get through the scene because it was so gross. There was a moment at three in the morning where I had a fake half-testicle in my mouth, and I said to Ciarán, 'What is this job that we do? What have we done with our lives?'"

It was a hilarious break from the heavy material. "Hugo told me this was a marathon, and he was right," Spencer says. "I had to pace myself. Especially with all the pain that Eli carries along, I knew that I'd have to take my time with it — and also carry that kind of energy for six months."

Without revealing any spoilers, Blunt issues a final warning: "Get worried about everyone. This is a brutal world." But one worth cherishing.

Read more on Native American inclusion in the television industry.

In addition to Hugo Blick and Emily Blunt, Greg Brenman is an executive producer. The English is produced by Drama Republic Ltd. and Eight Rooks Ltd. and is a coproduction of Amazon Studios and BBC.

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine issue #10, 2022, under the title, "Their Western Union."