Despite A Quiet Place‘s huge success in 2018—making a whopping $340.9 million at the box office—John Krasinskiwas reluctant to write and direct a sequel.
Speaking exclusively with E! News during Sunday’s premiere of A Quiet Place 2 in Manhattan, the 40-year-old actor and filmmaker shared that his wife Emily Blunt shared the same reservations when Paramount, the studio responsible for the first film, reached out to pitching a sequel.
However, after some back and forth between the two—the former The Office alum changed his mind a short time thereafter.
“[Emily] was really kind to realize that I wasn’t going to do a sequel either, I told the studio that I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t want to write and direct the next one because the first one was so incredibly personal,” Krasinski explained. “[It was] so incredibly organic to who I was and me as a parent and so when I thought of this new idea and she said ‘Why don’t you write it?'”
Krasinski added, “[She said] ‘If I see that you’re in love with it as much as you were with the first one, I’ll do it. So she read the script and said I’m in.”
But it wasn’t just any scene that moved her to change her mind about being on board for a sequel. According to Variety, it was the movie’s opening scene that will have viewers on the edge of their seats.
In an interview with the publication at the movie’s premiere, Blunt said, “He pitched me the opening, and I was like, ‘Oh my god.’ [It was] undeniably great, and I realized I would have been an idiot not to want to be in that opening sequence. We had to surrender to the idea that we wanted to do it and lose our snobbery.'”
Since its inception, Krasinski was pretty tight-lipped about whether Blunt would star in it. “I don’t know, we’ll have to see,” he told E! News in 2018. “We’ll have to see who’s in it.”
The sequel continues The Abbott Family’s journey as they face new terrors of the outside world and fight for survival, in complete silence.
The film will also star Cilian Murphy, Milicent Simmonds, and Noah Jupe.
In the past, the actor has also opened up about what it was like co-starring in the hit-movie alongside his wife. “I said to Emily, ‘There’s no greater gift that the universe could have given me than to go through the biggest success of my career and I don’t have to explain to you how it felt.’ We were both in the boat,” Krasinski told Men’s Health. “I said to her ‘I don’t know if it can ever be like this again.'”
“And—again, leave it to Emily, who is better at everything than me—she goes, ‘It can’t.’ She just so perfectly encapsulated it,” he continued. “‘It can’t be like this again, and it shouldn’t. So take this and put it on a mantel, this really special treasure that we experienced together. And now go out and do something else.’ I know I’ll never do another movie that’s this successful, this original, this underdog-y, and then on top of it have it be with my wife every step of the way.”
A Quiet Place 2 premieres on March 20, 2020.
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