Twenty years, five minutes: why The Devil Wears Prada 2 is happening now

For Aline, the gap between the two films is hard to measure. “It feels like it’s been 20 years and five minutes and it’s so strange,” she told Edith.

The sequel was not inevitable. Frankel and Brosh McKenna have dipped a toe in the water on and off across two decades, the way long-term collaborators do, asking each other if it might be time. The thing that finally turned a maybe into a yes was Meryl Streep.

“I’d been sort of peppering him with ideas, and we heard that Meryl was open to hearing ideas. That felt like a concrete step, and if Meryl thought there was something interesting there, then there would be something interesting there. So we went to see her, and that first meeting was really the spark that lit the flame.”

That meeting set everything in motion. Streep’s instinct, Brosh McKenna explained later in the interview, was central to the first film succeeding the way it did. Bringing the band back together started with her.

Writing Miranda Priestly for a digitised world

The curiosity that drove the script was about now, not nostalgia. The world has shifted on its axis since Runway’s offices first appeared on screen, and the writer wanted to know what it had done to these people.

“That was the curiosity. That’s what we were excited about, to see, in the many sea changes that have happened since 2006, what would they be doing? What would they be thinking? What would their challenges be? Everybody’s had an increasingly difficult time trying to navigate a world with monetisation and digitisation, all these words that we now have to deal with, that didn’t even exist when we had our flip phones in 2006.”

She paused on a fact that lands harder than it should: when the original film came out, the iPhone had not yet launched. It arrived the following year. Every assumption the first film made about how a glossy magazine empire functions has been reshaped since. The sequel sits inside that aftershock.

New York, Milan and Lake Como: the locations of The Devil Wears Prada 2

Place has always mattered to The Devil Wears Prada. New York is a character in the first film and a character again here, and Brosh McKenna writes locations into the script with a specificity that gives her collaborators something to push against.

Manhattan returns in full force, the cafeteria included. Aline fought for that one.

“David’s always looking for the coolest place to shoot, and he was really worried about the cafeteria scene. The cafeteria to me was like an old friend I wanted to see again, so I was very insistent that we find a cafeteria scene and not move it elsewhere in the office. One of my favourite scenes in the first movie is Nigel and Andy getting to know each other in the cafeteria.”

The bigger geographical shift in this film is Milan, a fashion capital that has been less photographed than its European counterparts. After a rough draft was on the page, Aline travelled there with the team.

“Milan was the joy of discovery. I didn’t know that much about Milan, and it’s such a classic, classic fashion city, with one of the most prominent fashion weeks. It’s a really wonderful, elegant city. There are other European cities that have been photographed a lot more, and have been in a lot more movies than Milan. So that felt like a fresh and really specific use of a city. It’s like making a movie about cars in Detroit. It is a central industry there.”

From Milan, the production found its way to Lake Como. Originally Aline had written that section of the story to take place in a palazzo with an interior courtyard, but the proximity of the lake changed the plan and the result is one of the film’s most cinematic sequences.

“That boat, the beautiful, shiny wooden boat, as it just glides across the lake. I always think about that. That is our little James Bond moment.”

The Hamptons join the map too, a new setting in this film and a way to see Miranda Priestly somewhere we have never seen her before.

Justin Theroux as Benji: the optimistic outsider with calculation in his eyes

The sequel introduces a new character, Benji, played by Justin Theroux. On paper Benji could read as an antagonist. In practice he is something stranger and, in Aline’s reading, sadder.

“What interested me about Benji is that he has his completely own point of view on what’s happening, and in an interesting way doesn’t plug into what other people are worried about. He has this buoyancy to him. That was hinted at in the script, but then Justin came on and just immediately locked onto this guy. It had said in the scene description that he had a weird laugh, and Justin really found his own laugh.”

The result is a character who is harder to pin down than a clean villain.

“If you’re paying attention, there’s always a level of calculation in his eyes, but he brought this very, almost scarily optimistic, bouncy quality to him.”

Why The Devil Wears Prada 2 has no villain

Edith pushed Aline on Benji’s near-villainy, and the writer used the moment to set out something more fundamental about what this film is trying to say.

“A lot of people have asked me who the villain of the movie is, and to me it’s such a human story. It’s really a story about everybody being pressed into odd shapes because of what it takes to thrive and survive. I don’t really see anybody in the movie as a villain except the massive downward pressure of having to figure out how to literally earn your keep at every moment. Benji’s problems are our problems. We’ve all been made products in an interesting different way.”

That framing reframes everything else in the film. The fashion, the empire, the assistants, the new players. None of them are operating from cruelty. They are operating from compression.

Emily Blunt returns: beautiful, imperious, and a nervous wreck

Emily Blunt’s character has always been a fan favourite, and in The Devil Wears Prada 2 she returns with the same nervous magnetism that powered the original.

“The essence of Emily, as Emily Blunt created her and as we wrote her in these two movies, is that she’s very beautiful, very successful, very imperious, but she’s a nervous wreck. She’s an absolute nervous wreck, and you feel that vibration. The anxiety, that it could all go upside down for her at any minute. That’s what Emily Blunt brought to the role. You really feel for her, because you know she’s dancing on the head of a pin.”

The collaboration on set is close. Aline and Emily Blunt trade ideas, lines, beats. One of the lines that has stayed with Edith is Emily telling Andy to please, for one minute, hide a feeling. Aline traced it back to a real conversation.

“I had a conversation with someone where they were describing themselves, and they said, it’s like I’m saying to myself, God, hide a feeling. I think that’s so relatable, because we all on some level know that our feelings are being broadcast across our faces, even if we don’t want them to be.”

Meryl Streep, Miranda Priestly, and costume as armour

The most fascinating insight Aline shared was about how Meryl Streep approaches Miranda Priestly’s wardrobe. For Streep, costume is not decoration. It is dramaturgy.

“She approaches costumes in a way that I’ve never seen. It’s like she’s choosing armour. It has a function for her in the storytelling. So it’s rarely about, does this look good on me. It’s mostly about, how is this clothing advancing the story. She thinks about it in a really, really specific narrative way.”

A tassel jacket in the film is, in Aline’s words, almost its own character. Each garment is “selected for a very specific type of battle. It’s sort of like a warrior choosing their various shields and banners.”

That collaboration extends to costume designer Molly Rogers. Aline writes more clothing into the script than most writers, and the costume room on this production was, she said, the size of two football fields.

“Costumes is my favourite department. On every place that I’ve ever worked, that’s been my happy place. So much thought is given to it. Molly and I really spent a lot, a lot of time together. You go into those fittings and watch how Molly had interpreted what was in the script for the character, and you build that last little bit of a character there.”

A different Miranda: the Hamptons, the home, the rosé

The Devil Wears Prada 2 moves Miranda Priestly into spaces the first film never showed us. The Hamptons. Her home in the morning. Her home late at night. A version of Miranda that Aline calls, with affection, “slightly buzzed on rosé Miranda”.

“I love this moment where she walks out of the kitchen kind of swinging her hips. You can really see in Meryl’s movements that she’s had a couple.”

That broader access is part of the storytelling logic. Andy was on the periphery as an assistant. Now she sits in middle management, closer in, and what she sees of her boss is necessarily fuller and stranger. As Aline put it, that is what happens as you rise up in any workplace. You start to see the person you used to only see the surface of.

Stanley Tucci’s Nigel, and a new assistant in Simone

Stanley Tucci’s Nigel remains a heartbeat character for Aline and David Frankel both. Edith floated a Nigel spin-off, half joking. Aline raised her stakes to four spin-offs!

“Stanley’s doing something in every moment of every scene, even when he’s not speaking, doesn’t have dialogue. He’s really extraordinary. They’re all extraordinary. But Nigel holds a special place, certainly for David and me. Nigel is a very internal guy. He doesn’t really wear his heart on his sleeve, and so I think there’s an intriguing mystery to the way Stanley plays Nigel.”

A new face that Aline is particularly excited about is Simone, Miranda Priestly’s young assistant in this film. Miranda checks in with her, defers to her at points, even when she could just dismiss.

“Sometimes you meet people who are very young, or not technically in power, but they have this regal charisma. She has it. Even though she’s so far down the pecking order from Miranda, Miranda just instinctively respects her.”

The scene Aline Brosh McKenna would live inside

Edith ended the conversation by inviting Aline to step out of writer and producer mode and pick a scene she would simply live in. The answer was Miranda’s hotel room in Italy, a set that production designer Jess Gonchor built in a historic mansion in upstate New York.

“He created this incredible juxtaposition of old Italy, new Italy, sort of Memphis and modern, and really old style Italian filigree baroque. I’m sure I’m using all those words incorrectly, but it’s just an amazing set. There’s a great shot where somebody mentions the room is small, and she comments on it, and she says, it’s a bit snug, but it’ll do. We’re way far back, shooting it from below, and it’s so spectacular. I love that fake hotel. I napped on that bed. I wanted to live inside that fake hotel.”

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is in cinemas now