If everyone seems genuinely scared of Miranda Priestly in the first Devil Wears Prada movie, it's because Meryl Streep made it all too real.
Playing the icy editor of Runway magazine – a stand-in for real-life Vogue editor Anna Wintour – Streep decided, for the first time in her career, to try method acting.
Throughout the two-month shoot in 2005, the Oscar-winning actress kept her distance from her younger co-stars, Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt, preserving authority and keeping the two off balance even after cameras stopped rolling.
“I was quite scared because I feel like you were in a zone,” Blunt said during a SiriusXM Front Row interview with Andy Cohen. “She was in a Miranda zone.”
“Oh, yeah,” Streep agreed. “I was in that zone.”
That tension helped make the film one of the most memorable comedies of its time. It also made Streep miserable.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly in 2021, she recalled the pain of removing herself from the part of moviemaking she usually enjoys most.
“It was horrible,” Streep said. “I could hear them all rocking and laughing. I was so depressed. I said: ‘Well, it’s the price you pay for being boss.’
“That’s the last time I ever attempted a 'method' thing,” Streep added. And in The Devil Wears Prada 2, she keeps that promise.
The decision came in part from director David Frankel. Returning to helm the sequel alongside writer Aline Brosh McKenna, Frankel says his guiding principle for both the performers and the audience came down to the same feeling that helped the first film endure.
“One thing that I associate with the first movie is the sensation of joy,” Frankel tells The National. “It’s rewatchable, it’s quotable and it makes you feel good. That was one of my motivations – to make another movie that really makes you feel good when you walk out of the theatre.
“On the set, it was a joyful experience for everybody to revisit these characters and to inhabit this world and put on these amazing clothes and say this witty dialogue. So, yeah, it was all about fun.”
The change in Miranda is also story-driven – and a reflection of real-life changes to the industry the film portrays. Miranda has not lost her edge completely – Streep is clear on that. But she’s not the woman she once was, nor can she be.
“I don’t think she’s come down completely from her pedestal of mean. I think she is still plenty mean and efficient at what she does,” Streep explains. “But there’s been an evolution.”
The sequel takes place in a world where print media is no longer firmly at the centre of culture, and journalism as a whole is under threat. Runway is still a haven of sorts, offering a well-paying editorial job to former assistant turned award-winning journalist Andy Sachs (Hathaway) after she is laid off from her newspaper gig. However, now advertisers hold the power, circulation has dwindled, and figures who once begged for interviews ignore calls.
Frankel says: “It took 20 years because we did not have the imagination to figure out how to get these two characters, Andy and Miranda, back into the same office again.
“We realised a couple of years ago that maybe Andy’s going to be desperate for a job. Newspapers are shrinking. And maybe there’s a way to get her to work with Miranda again, and Miranda is going to need her.”
Hathaway adds: “Aline Brosh McKenna was inspired by everything that’s going on in fashion and journalism – it feels like those worlds are kind of under siege right now.”
Miranda is still grappling with those changes, though what drives her hasn't changed at all, Streep explains.
“What I like about this is that Miranda, who is defined by her power, not her scruples, is suddenly having to navigate a world where she's in danger of losing the control she so tightly holds over what she does.”
In Streep’s mind, Miranda is not simply a bully on a power trip. Rather, she’s an idealist who holds everything to an exacting standard because of the grander pursuit of her work – and cruelty was an unfortunate means to achieve it. But in a vastly changed media landscape, she’s had to alter her approach to achieve the same goal.
“Part of what I loved about the first film was you got a glimpse of the fact she does love what she does, that her attachment is not just to being in charge. It's being in charge of something in a quest for beauty and a celebration of the best in human accomplishments. She fosters that. She has a feeling that she's a curator of culture,” says Streep.
“To keep that going and to keep it going financially, she takes a lot of pride in it. And as the bolts fall out of the ship and she feels it's in danger, she has to compromise, which is a word that comes hard to her.”
But in the process of changing by necessity, the difficulty of the situation has helped Miranda stop taking others for granted, Streep explains, which directly informed her process in the new film.
“She comes to realise how much she relies on people who have supported her. And I like all those realisations. I like that evolution,” she says.
Emily Charlton (Blunt) is the clearest measure of how much has changed, and how much has not.
In the first film, Emily was the assistant who already knew the rules. She understood Miranda’s rhythms, her silences and the danger of getting anything wrong. Twenty years later, now an executive at Dior, she has power of her own, but Blunt says the old need for Miranda’s approval has not disappeared.
“Emily is now in a position of power, which she loves to lord over anyone in sight,” Blunt says. “I think she moved with the times. She survived. She decided to go into retail because that is the sure-fire bet to domination.
“But in her heart, she deeply wants to be deemed iconic, certainly by Miranda.”
For Frankel, that push and pull is at the heart of this new story. The first film belonged largely to Andy, arriving at Runway and trying to leave with her integrity intact. The second grapples with a different question: is there still a place at the top for Miranda Priestly in today's world?
“We wanted to make it different than the first movie,” he says. “The characters are older. They’re not necessarily wiser, but they’re more vulnerable. Their jobs are more endangered.
“If you watch both movies together, there’s a nice continuum, and you see the growth and the changes in the characters. Emotionally, I think they feel quite different. One is a little more from Andy’s perspective, and one is a little more from Miranda’s perspective.”
The Devil Wears Prada 2 opens in cinemas across the UAE on Thursday
