If you find yourself impressed by Simone Ashley in The Devil Wears Prada 2, you’re in good company. Meryl Streep got there first.
“Simone Ashley doesn’t try at all,” Streep says. “She owns the screen.”
“Yeah, she’s subtly perfect,” Anne Hathaway says. “Simone Ashley’s a sleek racehorse. She’s a thoroughbred. She glides.”
Emily Blunt goes a bit further: “We’ve been usurped by Simone Ashley."
The British actress, who became a global name through Netflix shows Sex Education and Bridgerton, now sits in the top assistant seat once filled by Blunt and Hathaway in the first film. She walked on to the set of the long-awaited sequel looking as if she belonged there, but inside, she says, she was still finding her footing.
“I didn't feel like that at all,” Ashley tells The National. “That’s so nice that they said that. I think I came in confident, but I didn’t feel like I owned the place. I was just trying to learn as much as possible.”
This isn't the first time she has had to find that balance. As Kate Sharma in Bridgerton, she entered a series that already had a devoted global audience and became the centre of its successful second season. But in The Devil Wears Prada 2, she had far bigger Chanel boots to fill – and she knew it.
The film returns nearly two decades after the original turned Miranda Priestly, Andy Sachs and Emily Charlton into pop-cultural shorthand, with Streep, Hathaway, Blunt and Stanley Tucci all back in place.
Ashley plays Amari, one of the new faces at Runway. The first instruction on set was simple: do not try to be Emily Blunt. Ashley says director David Frankel and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna were clear from the start.
“What was really amazing from David and Aline, they didn’t want to make a remix of the first movie,” she says. “They actually encouraged me not to watch it too much and impersonate Emily Blunt’s iconic performance. Because, I mean, how could you? Her performance was just so unique to what she did with it, and they wanted this movie to truly be something of its own 20 years later.”
Blunt's character remains one of the original film’s sharpest creations: frantic, wounded, ambitious and still quotable two decades later. Ashley’s Amari enters the same world, with the same impossible standards around her, but she is given space to build her own rhythm.
That matters to Ashley, especially now. Her work reaches young women in countries far from where the films and shows are made. She says she has been thinking about this more and more as her career has progressed.
“That’s something I’m increasingly aware of as I continue with my career,” she says. “I think when I’m working, making music, a TV series, making a movie, or whatever it might be, I am obviously just really excited to be doing my work and my art and doing whatever I can to make it something that I love, something I’m proud of, because that’s why I got into this in the first place. I just love being an artist.
“But when I am making things, I do consider: is this an honest reflection to my audience? Is this setting a good example to young women watching this? Once the art is done, once the work is done, I believe it is about community.”
The sequel has also given her a new kind of form to work in. Bridgerton had the space of a season to let Kate’s guardedness, anger and longing unfold. In the two-hour run time of The Devil Wears Prada 2, there's not a moment to spare.
“When we were filming this, we were improvising a lot, and sometimes the scenes extended, or we added things, tried different things, and sometimes things really worked and landed on the day we were filming,” she says. “But something I really noticed when I watched it for the first time, I realised how much they edited it and how things were cut down so much, but they buttoned all the scenes so perfectly.
“This film, the original, is so famous for having these amazing one-liners. And I think that’s why it belongs in a movie. What David and Aline and everyone have executed is just so chic, and it’s so subtly fabulous. In the world of a TV series, I personally feel like you wouldn’t be able to do that, because there’s too much space and room to let it just over-egg and go somewhere.”
The fashion world around the film has changed too. The original arrived in 2006, when Runway still felt like the centre of a certain cultural universe. In the sequel, the industry has moved on, and the people inside it can feel the shift.
Some of Ashley’s friends who work in fashion came to the premiere.
“They were like, wow, we’re cooked,” Ashley says. “Things have changed so much.”
But while the film does get into the shifting realities and increasing challenges in the worlds of both fashion and publishing, it ultimately prioritises joy. For fans new and old, it creates a communal experience for all those who love both worlds to remember why they love them in the first place. And for Ashley, that's what mattered most of all.
“Even when we were at the premiere the other night, just seeing how many people were so happy to be there and so excited to be there,” Ashley says. “That’s what art is about. It’s about bringing people together.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 is in cinemas across the Middle East
