Why Emily Blunt is Starring In New PSA For Stuttering: 'They Aren't Asking to Be Fixed'
Why Emily Blunt is Starring In New PSA For Stuttering: 'They Aren't Asking to Be Fixed'
Gillian TellingFri, June 5, 2026 at 7:07 PM UTC
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Emily Blunt attends the "Disclosure Day" photocall at Rose Court on June 05, 2026 in LondonCredit: Gareth Cattermole/Getty
Key Takeaways
Emily Blunt is supporting the American Institute of Stuttering's new PSA to raise awareness about living with a stutter
The actress has spoken openly about her lifelong struggle with stuttering, which she says is neurological and often hereditary
Blunt credits acting and speech therapy with helping her manage her stutter but notes there is no cure
Emily Blunt, who has been open in the past about living with a stutter, is lending her support for a new PSA from the American Institute of Stuttering called "Just Listen."
"What 'Just Listen' says is simple but powerful: people who stutter aren't asking to be fixed, they're asking to be heard," Blunt tells PEOPLE of the spot. "Lending my voice to this PSA was my way of reminding people that what we have to say is worth waiting for."
The actress, 43, most recently talked about her stutter on the Today Show:
"It was something I struggled with severely when I was a child," Blunt said. "It's still something that I contend with under certain environments, moments of stress, fatigue, pressure. And it's neurological, it's biological, it's often hereditary. It runs very prominently in my family. So, my uncle, my cousin, my grandfather."
She added that the affliction had been difficult to live with growing up.
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"As a child, you don't understand why you can't speak," she said. "You know exactly what you want to say. You would love to read your poem out in class and you just find ways to avoid speaking. That kind of disfluency is usually really misunderstood by people and misidentified as other things."
Emily Blunt attends the Paris premiere of "Disclosure Day" at the Grand Rex on June 02, 2026 in Paris, France.Credit: Kristy Sparow/Getty
Blunt, who is starring in the upcoming alien film Disclosure Day,went through intensive speech therapy at a clinic in Virginia in her earlier days, and has credited acting with helping her overcome disfluency, while noting there's no actual "cure."
"I contend with it when I say my own name because you can't substitute your name for other words. You'll find stutterers will often go through this elaborate mental and verbal gymnastics of substituting other words constantly if you feel one coming up that's going to knock you."
"I think it's emotionally exhausting," she said of living with a stutter.
"I think that we all want to show who we are and I think that's the entrapment of it, that you feel like there's this sort of impostor in your body that misrepresents who you really are. It's really frustrating and there's a helplessness that people can feel and a loneliness, and people just avoid and they start shutting down and they just don't speak."
on People
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
