Emily Blunt just gave birth to her first child in February, but she’s refuses to let pregnancy or her now-active family life stop her from going after her career aspirations. Since her breakout in 2006’s comedy-drama The Devil Wears Prada, the 31-year-old actress has been nominated for four Golden Globe Awards, two London Film Critics’ Circle Awards, one BAFTA Award and won a Golden Globe Award for her work in the BBC television drama Gideon’s Daughter. In this weekend’s Edge of Tomorrow, Blunt hopes to show the world that she has what it takes to be a true action star and headline a sci-fi blockbuster alongside Tom Cruise.

Edge of Tomorrow, which opens Friday, stars Blunt and Cruise as soldiers trying to destroy lethal aliens. The role required months of training, as Blunt had to be able to wear an 85-pound exosuit without collapsing.

“The thought of this I found intimidating. Every action movie I read, it’s the girlfriend role. I have nothing against it, but it’s not what I wanted to do. If I do an action movie, I want to do some action,” said Blunt. “This was six days a week, two and a half hours a day. It was brutal at first and then became addictive. I wanted her to look lethal and I wanted to go all the way,”

“She had trained so hard. … We ate burgers and passed out,” said Cruise, praising his Tomorrow co-star. “It’s amazing what she accomplished, obviously with the stunts and the character she created. She is just (expletive) good.”

The film’s director Doug Liman also had nothing but praise for Blunt and the changes she underwent for the film, telling USA Today:

“She’s got more edge, in the best possible sense of the word. She’s a powerful, strong person. But physically, she went through training on par with what I put Matt Damon through to get ready for The Bourne Identity. She had the huge advantage of having Tom Cruise as a training partner. I’ve never seen anyone work as hard physically preparing for a role as Tom Cruise. She started training three months before she even showed up in England to start rehearsing.”

The vigorous training caused a noticeable transformation in Blunt, giving her a muscled build that intimated her husband, actor John Krasinski.

“He thought I was going to bench him. I don’t know if I looked terribly alluring. I was all edges,” said Blunt. “It was empowering for sure, being like this for a while. I got pregnant a couple of months after I finished this, so I went from one extreme to another.”

Instead of taking a break from her busy acting schedule once she got pregnant, Blunt immediately started filming her first massive musical movie, Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods. Now that her daughter Hazel has been born and she’s officially a first-time mom, Blunt knows that she will have to start adjusting her priorities. However, she still has plans to continue her busy acting career and will be going back to work this summer to film the drama Sicari with Benicio Del Toro.

“It splits your focus, obviously. I do love my work. I’m a little leery of going back to work in a way I never used to be. … But I think it’s a good thing to do both. Having a baby will make me very specific about what I choose to do.”