When The Devil Wears Prada came out 20 years ago, it had a sweet, intimate premiere at the 2006 LA Film Festival, followed by a couple international promotional stops, and a party in New York. “The first movie was really the little movie that could,” screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna tells Vanity Fair. “It kind of came out of nowhere and the expectations were quite low.”
The film about an aspiring journalist, starring Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep, swept up into the world of a glamorous fashion magazine went on to be a massive hit, was nominated for two Oscars, and became a beloved classic. Fans have been waiting for two decades for the return of Miranda Priestly and company.
So this time around, for the release of The Devil Wears Prada 2, McKenna and the cast went on a globe-trotting promotional tour (Paris! Madrid! London! Seoul! Sydney! New York!). On these stops, she met many fans who shared with her the impact of the first movie. “Especially when young women come in and talk about what the first movie has meant to them and inspired them to be journalists, that makes me happy because I think it’s such a necessary occupation,” she says.
The Devil Wears Prada 2, which opens in theaters on May 1, brings us back into the offices of the fictional Runway magazine, where Miranda Priestly (Streep) is still in charge, but after a scandal hits the publication, Andy Sachs (Hathaway) is hired as a features editor to help right the ship. Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci also reprise their roles, and director David Frankel returns to helm.
The film retains what made the original so successful: smart comedy, incredible fashion, fun cameos, and loveable characters. Where the first film captured a yesteryear of magazine journalism, one of glitz, glamour, and expense accounts, this paints a picture of the state of media as it is now: a profession that is struggling with mass layoffs, corporate takeovers, shrinking budgets, and more focus on digital and social media coverage.
McKenna, whose other credits include 27 Dresses, We Bought a Zoo, and the series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, dishes on her memories of making the first movie, her nerves around Meryl Streep, and what it took to get a sequel to finally walk down the runway.
Vanity Fair: When you were brought on to adapt the book for the first film, there were already some attempts that hadn’t worked. What was it about your approach that really cracked it?
Aline Brosh McKenna: I think that tonally it was a tough one because fashion has an inherent silliness to it, and it had a tendency to kind of veer into rompy fun. My approach and David’s approach – even though we didn’t know each other and we met the day I pitched – we both had this idea that we would take this world and this woman, Miranda Priestley, very, very seriously, because it is a big business and it is a high stakes business that’s controlled in this instance by a woman. And we both really wanted to dry it up a little bit in terms of making sure that it was very real. It was like one of the great professional blind dates of my life was just to meet David and find that we were speaking the same language.