There’s A Reason Meryl Streep Was Never The Same Again After The Devil Wears Prada

What’s Meryl Streep’s most iconic role? Joanna in Kramer vs. Kramer? The desperate mom in Sophie’s Choice? Maybe, but we think it’s Miranda Priestley in The Devil Wears Prada! Disagree if you like, but you should know that this one performance took a lot out of her. Playing Priestley was so bad, in fact, that Streep decided to change the whole way she approached her career. Who knew?

Miranda Priestly was a rare antihero role for Streep. And while she’s a fascinating – even hilarious – character to watch, you wouldn’t want to cross paths with her. Remember how she makes Andy utterly miserable throughout the entire movie? She has a real-life inspiration, too.

Yes, the actual Priestley is said to be one of the most powerful women in fashion: Vogue editor Anna Wintour. When Lauren Weisberger wrote the book the movie is based on, she was inspired by her past experiences working as Wintour’s assistant. But Streep took the character in a whole new direction.

During a 2021 cast reunion for Entertainment Weekly, Streep went into details. She remembered, “I wasn’t interested in doing a biopic on Anna. I was interested in her position in her company. I wanted to take on the burdens she had to carry, along with having to look nice every day.”

Oh, and the filmmakers were also worried about incurring the wrath of Wintour. As soon as news got around about The Devil Wears Prada’s plot, folks in the editor’s circle backed away from the film. Screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna told Entertainment Weekly, “I had enormous trouble finding anyone in the fashion world who’d talk to me. [That’s] because people were afraid of Anna and Vogue – not wanting to be blackballed.”

McKenna went on, “There was one person who spoke to me, whose name I will never divulge, who read it and said, ‘The people in this movie are too nice. No one in that world is too nice. They don’t have to be, and they don’t have time to be.’ After that, I did a pass to make everyone a bit busier and meaner.”

“Meaner” might well have been the word. Writer Plum Sykes said of Wintour in the 2000 BBC documentary Boss Woman, “I’m scared of her. Everyone’s scared of her. She’s an intimidating person because she is so incredible.” She added, “Anna would never specify how you need to look, but I know that if I went into her office I would need to wear high heels and look groomed and look ‘fashion.’”

Model Gisele Bündchen, who played Serena in the film, told Entertainment Weekly for the reunion, “You just knew the people that worked at Vogue were dedicated and professional. Anna was the final word, and everyone wanted to please her…but that’s true for everything. Who doesn’t want to please their boss?” That could have been the tagline for the film.

Yet Anna Wintour wasn’t actually offended by the film when it came out, by her own account anyway. The fearsome editor told the ABC News show in 2006, “Anything that makes fashion entertaining and glamorous and interesting is wonderful for our industry. So I was 100 percent behind it.”

Wintour also came to a screening of the movie in May 2006. McKenna told Entertainment Weekly, “Anna came to the first screening in New York. She sat right in front of me and David [Frankel] with her daughter and wore Prada, which shows she has a great sense of humor!”

And Wintour was totally fine with Streep’s portrayal of the character based on her. She told ABC News, “I think it’s actually helpful to people that you are working with, that you can make decisions. So, if Meryl seemed somewhat strong, I respect that.” How did Streep feel about it, though?

Streep had plenty to say in the Entertainment Weekly cast reunion article. She had some interesting thoughts about Miranda Priestley and what an unpleasant, if interesting, person she was. She mused, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely…. I liked that there wasn’t any backing away from the horrible parts of her.”

It was Streep, interestingly, who helped Anne Hathaway be cast as Andy, the beleaguered assistant. Hathaway badly wanted the role, but the studio wasn’t sure. Hathaway was known for more kid-orientated fare, and that wasn’t what they wanted. Rachel McAdams was offered the part, but she turned it down three times.

Director David Frankel told Entertainment Weekly, Brokeback Mountain was about to come out. Annie had a wonderful, small role in that. And Meryl watched that scene from the movie, she met with her and called up Tom Rothman at Fox and said, ‘Yeah, this girl’s great, and I think we’ll work well together.’”

Hathaway was absolutely overjoyed when she won the role. She told the mag, “I remember the moment I found out I got the part, I just ran screaming through my apartment. I had a bunch of friends over at the time, I just jumped up in the living room and screamed, ‘I’m going to be in The Devil Wears Prada!’” And of course she had her co-star to thank.

It was also Streep who convinced the studio to let Miranda Priestley have white hair. Costume designer Patricia Field told Entertainment Weekly, “Meryl told me she [wanted] to have white hair.… I said to Meryl, ‘I can’t convince [the producers]. They have in their mind that white hair is gray hair.’”

Elizabeth Gabler, the former president of Fox 2000, told the magazine, “Meryl and J. Roy Helland, who’s been at her side through so much of her career, came up with the look, which we weren’t expecting. She just said ‘My girls, don’t you worry, this is what I’m going to do and it’s going to be great.’”

David Frankel remembered, “The first time Meryl was Miranda Priestly was a meeting with the head of the studio. Meryl channeled Miranda in that meeting, and there was no conversation about the hair; they looked into Meryl’s eyes and never said a word.” Streep was method acting, and how.

And Streep did method acting for the whole movie. She remained in character as Miranda Priestley even when the cameras weren’t rolling. She kept her co-stars Emily Blunt and Anne Hathaway at a distance, even being cold to them sometimes, because that’s what her character does to their characters.

Blunt told Entertainment Weekly, “Meryl is so gregarious and fun as hell, in some ways it wasn’t the most fun for her having to remove herself. It wasn’t like she was unapproachable; You could go up to her and say, ‘Oh my God, the funniest thing just happened,’ and she’d listen, but I don’t know if it was the most fun for her to be on set being that way.”

Hathaway had similar thoughts, but she was full of praise for Streep. She told the magazine, “I did feel intimidated, but I always felt cared for. I knew that whatever she was doing to create that fear, I appreciated [because] I also knew she was watching out for me.”

In the scene where Miranda tells Andy she’s disappointing, Hathaway remembered, “When the camera turned on me, the pressure really got to me, and I’d had such emotional fluidity up to that point, but it just wasn’t there anymore. I remember having the experience of watching [her] watch me, and [she] altered [her] performance ever so slightly, and just made it a little bit different, and brought more out of me.”

The Entertainment Weekly cast reunion wasn’t the first time Hathaway had spoken about her experiences with Streep on The Devil Wears Prada. Because in 2014 she appeared on The Graham Norton Show, and she spoke about how things went with her method-acting co-star back in the day.

Hathaway remembered, “When I met [Streep] she gave me a huge hug. [A]nd I’m like, ‘Oh my god, we are going to have the best time on this movie.’ And then she’s like, ‘Ah sweetie, that’s the last time I’m nice to you.’ She then went into her trailer and came out the ice queen and that was really the last I saw of ‘Meryl’ for months, until we promoted the film.”

So Hathaway was terrified of Streep for a while. She told Stephen Colbert on The Late Show in 2018, “There’s a scene where Andy and Miranda are getting out of a car... Now, Meryl was kind of an island unto herself when we filmed this, so I didn’t get to talk to her too much. But I was going to get a whole scene to sit in a car with her. And I was just freaking out.”

Hathaway went on, “And you have to understand, like talking can be hard for me… And so but, I was like, ‘I’m going to take advantage of this moment. I’m going to force myself to speak to Meryl Streep.’ But I couldn’t just talk to her. I couldn’t just be a person. I had to impress her.”

The younger actress remembered that she threw multiple conversation starters at Streep and none of them worked. She said, “And if you have anxiety, and you force yourself to talk to someone, being met with silence is like being thrown into a demonic pit. It’s so bad.” Eventually she tried talking about Jon Stewart.

Hathaway apparently asked Streep, “By any chance did you see the Daily Show with Jon Stewart last night? I think that he is just so brilliant. I think he is saving America.” After that, Hathaway said, she sat “in the silence thinking my life was over.” But Streep finally spoke up with “No, I don’t think Jon Stewart is going to save America. I think Stephen Colbert is.” Obviously Colbert loved that.

Yet Streep herself didn’t like how she’d behaved on the Prada set. Not in the slightest. She told Entertainment Weekly, “It was horrible! I was [miserable] in my trailer. I could hear them all rocking and laughing. I was so depressed! I said, ‘Well, it’s the price you pay for being boss!’ That’s the last time I ever attempted a Method thing!”

And indeed Streep has cooled off on the method acting since then. Now she seems to stick to methods which affect only herself rather than any co-stars. For the 2015 movie Ricki and the Flash, for example, she spent six months learning how to play the guitar properly, all for the sake of authenticity.

Plus in true Meryl Streep fashion, she went all out. So determined was she to portray a rock star effectively that she even endured a bit of physical pain. The director Jonathan Demme remembered that one day Streep came up to him, and she had played so hard she’d actually made her fingers bleed.

But Streep has been on the other side of peoples’ method acting too – and when you know the details, it’s even less surprising that she decided to give it up. Take for example what happened in 1994 when she filmed The River Wild – she came dangerously close to getting killed. Yikes!

Because Streep was too tired to do a particular stunt, but the director insisted. So Streep got into a raft, right on the river, but then unfortunately the boat flipped over and almost drowned her. When she got out, she informed the Orlando Sentinel newspaper in 1994, she told the director, “I really feel quite sure if I say that I’m too tired to do something that we have to assume I’m telling the truth.”

And then there was what happened on the set of one of her earlier films. When Streep did the film Kramer vs. Kramer in 1979, her co-star Dustin Hoffman utilized the technique to painfully push her over the edge. Details of what exactly happened have come out over the years.

Hoffman and Streep’s characters were supposed to be arguing in one early scene of the movie. Yet reportedly Hoffman took things too far and actually slapped Streep around the face, hard enough to leave a red mark there. This was serious enough that she could have reported it, but she didn’t, according to Vanity Fair writer Michael Schulman’s account. 

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Hoffman allegedly brought up Streep’s boyfriend, John Cazale, who had recently passed away. Apparently he did this to unsettle her and make her just as angry as her character ought to be. Rumor has it that before the film’s famous courtroom scene, he whispered Cazale’s name in Streep’s ear. 

This is of course a far cry from Streep’s own method acting on the Prada set. Although she was distant from her co-stars, they understood why she was doing it, and none of them objected to her behavior. In fact, some stories focus on how kind and pleasant she was off-camera.

Emily Blunt told the show Sunday Today in 2018, “There was this crazy moment when I [finished] and I remember seeing [Streep] across the parking lot. She burst out of her trailer – the wig was off. She was just Meryl. She was in a puffy jacket. She was like, ‘You were so great,’ and I was just like [crying] and I just started to weep. It was sad.”

And Hathaway and Streep are still friends, which is surely delightful to Devil Wears Prada fans considering their chemistry in the movie. In 2011 the Kennedy Center honored Streep with a massive tribute show, and Hathaway led the movie’s cast in a tribute to the actress entitled “She’s Me Pal.”

So this might make you wonder: will there ever be a sequel to The Devil Wears Prada? Streep, Hathaway and Blunt have all said they think the movie works best as a stand-alone, but would still love to film with the same cast one day. No matter what happens there, we can be sure Streep won’t be freezing her co-stars out this time.