Emily Blunt let her imagination run wild as a child.
As a young girl in the U.K., the actress would often find herself on hamster rescues. (Yup, you read that right.) "What is a hamster rescue?" Stephen Colbert asked his guest on CBS' The Late Show Thursday. "Is that a British thing that we don't know about or is that what it sounds like?"
"I quite enjoyed rather dramatic role-play game," the actress explained. "My friends were like, 'That sounds lame, but I'll go along with it because I'm at your house, and I kinda have to do it.'"
"I had this lovely hamster called Tigger, who probably died before he should have died because of what I put him through," Blunt said of her "poor" pet. "We would sort of hide Tigger under a sofa cushion, and then I'd sort of pretend the roof was coming in. And I'd be like, 'Get Tigger! The roof is falling in!' I'd dive and I'd rescue Tigger—and Tigger would just be, like...[in a daze]."
In hindsight, Blunt admitted, "It was awful!"
"Were there adults watching you do this at the time?" Colbert asked.
"My mum had four kids," Blunt explained. "I think she was like, 'They sound like they're OK.'"
Concerned, Colbert joked with Blunt, "Torturing animals is one of the signs of a sociopath." As she laughed at the idea, the late-night host said, "Generally we get those kids medication now." Colbert still couldn't believe Blunt's friends played hamster rescue with her. "They kind of went along with it, but I think they thought it was strange—which you do as well!" she said. "It's OK!"
But thanks to her British accent, Colbert told her, "Anything you do sounds charming."
Later in the interview, she shared another childhood story—involving her dad, not Tigger. "He was sent off to the video store and would come back with the most inappropriate films. They were movies he wanted to see, so he'd come back with Jaws and Pretty Woman," she said. In the case of Pretty Woman, for example, "I just accepted it as, 'That's just how people interact!' The scene where she offers him the condoms—guys, you know! When she fans out the condoms? Remember that? And there's so many different colors and flavors? I was like, 'Why...? Oh, that's so cool! She's, like, giving him sweets to choose from.' My dad would be like, 'Yeah! Yeah! Absolutely! Sweets! And he can choose which one he wants.' He was explaining it to my mom, like, 'It goes right over their heads—no idea what's going on.'" He was right, too. "I was disturbed when I watched it later in life," she revealed. "I was like, 'Oh! They're condoms!'"
To this day, Blunt still loves watching Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.
"It's so good. 'Big mistake! Big! Huge!' Love it," she said, quoting the film. "The best! So good!"