Devil Wears Prada 2 Writer on Fan Service, Fashion and Meryl Streep
Aline Brosh McKenna at 'The Devil Wears Prada 2' New York premiere.
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Aline Brosh McKenna always seemed aware that writing a sequel to The Devil Wears Prada would be a dangerously narrow runway to walk. That’s probably why, as recently as three years ago, she wasn’t particularly keen on the idea. But when Meryl Streep says she’s thinking about revisiting one of her most famous roles, what’s a screenwriter to do?
It took 20 years after they released one of the most impactful comedies of the 21st century to get the entire band back together. But, as McKenna says, once she met with Streep… things moved very quickly. “Meryl’s opinion is enormously important,” says McKenna, whose other credits include 27 Dresses, Morning Glory, We Bought a Zoo and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. “And when she said she would be open to hearing some ideas, by that point, we had accumulated a lot of them.
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During a recent episode of The Hollywood Reporter podcast I’m Having an Episode (Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple), McKenna talked about building the wildly different but similarly glamorous world of The Devil Wears Prada, riffed on how elements of the original have aged and why one “That’s all” was enough.
When we spoke in early 2023, Emily Blunt and Anne Hathaway were really pushing the idea of a sequel. I asked if you were interested and you said, “Not really.”
I know! That’s right around the time when I started thinking about it. I follow all three of those industries: journalism, fashion, publishing, all fields that I love and maybe, in another world, would have worked in. As those fields have gotten turned upside down, I’ve always wondered. “What are these four characters doing in a world where how we make money is different?” The social values of workplaces have changed. The world has just changed so much in 20 years. Then I started calling David Frankel and saying, “You know what? I have some thoughts.” But the key to it, always, was finding a spot where Meryl was excited about it.
So how do you get Meryl Streep excited?
I wanted to get her thoughts early. So, I was excited to go see her and talk to her about it. It just so happened that we went to see her on a night when Lin-Manuel [Miranda] was doing a screening of it at the theater in Washington Heights that he was raising money for. I hadn’t seen it in the theater in years. And we had just spent the day talking about where these characters would be. It felt like kismet.
We live in this culture where there’s an expectation that if people like something — a series, a movie, a book — they feel entitled to more of it. And this has led to some great work. It has also led to a lot of work that maybe wasn’t needed. Among your collective, what was your barometer for deciding that the movie needed to be made — that this was not us just feeding into reboot and sequel culture?
I’m a big fan of movies from the 30s and 40s. And if something worked, they kept doing it. Even if it was just the same actors, even if it was just Hepburn and Tracy, if it was something that an audience responded to, they would make multiples. The idea that you can take existing material and recombine it and update it, that doesn’t offend me. And, in this case, we weren’t asked. The impetus didn’t come from Disney. The impetus was Wendy [Finerman], who produced the original, bringing to our attention that Meryl would like to talk about it. So it felt like how you build any movie. It came from a story that we were excited to tell. There was nothing cynical or calculated going into it, except my own desire as a fan just to go and revisit this.
Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci in The Devil Wears Prada 2.
Macall Polay/Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
Which you’ve thought about a lot over the years, I’m guessing.
I’ve thought of Miranda Priestly many times over the last 20 years. Anytime you’re in a situation which is a little irritating… you get the wrong coffee order or somebody is sitting in your plane seat. It’s just always fun to imagine what Miranda would have to say.
There was always going to be a lot of expectations on this project, but were you prepared for the scrutiny during production? It felt like the paparazzi photos from the set last summer were such an