The 2006 film “The Devil Wears Prada” starred Meryl Streep as the formidable Miranda Priestly, the fictional editor-in-chief of Runway magazine. Emily Blunt played Emily Charlton, Miranda’s first assistant — a role that helped launch her career.
With “The Devil Wears Prada 2” set to open May 1, the cast — Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci — reunited for an exclusive SiriusXM Front Row hosted by Andy Cohen, where Blunt revealed she was initially intimidated by Streep during the making of the first film.
When Cohen asked whether Streep had been difficult to approach on set, Blunt did not hold back. “I mean, on the first one, I was quite scared because I feel like you were in a zone,” she told her co-star directly. Streep’s response was immediate: “Oh, yeah. I was in that zone.” Blunt then elaborated: “She was in a Miranda zone.”
Blunt added that the zone was “not impenetrable,” explaining that cast members could approach Streep with a funny story, but she “wouldn’t do your extraordinary laugh that I normally heard.” Cohen then asked Streep whether she had been going “method” in her performance, to which she said no.
Streep elaborated on her technique. “The first three days I went and hung around the camera with the director, you know, and then we’d go on to do the scene, and I’d go, you know, ‘this,’ and they’d go … it was just like a remove. A slight remove. The authority, the thing,” she said.
Though Blunt was initially intimidated, the two later became close friends and have collaborated on multiple projects. Speaking to ELLE about reprising her role in the sequel, Blunt said: “It’s terribly moving. Because it changed everything. David Frankel changed my life by casting me when I was an unknown. I’d been working, but no one knew who I was, and he was so sure that he wanted me in the movie, from a taped reading. That meant a huge amount to me.”
“It did leave the door open for people to see me as more than a British period drama girl,” Blunt added. “It paved the way for character roles, which is all I wanted. I didn’t want to be an ingenue. I was curious to explore an entire bag of tricks.”
The sequel follows Miranda Priestly as she navigates her career amid the decline of traditional magazine publishing, facing off against Blunt’s character — now a senior executive at Dior — who controls advertising dollars that Priestly desperately needs.
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