“I’m over-related to Stanley Tucci now, I see him way too much.”
Emily Blunt’s deadpan humour is as note perfect in real life as it is in the much-anticipated and papped movie sequel, The Devil Wears Prada 2. 20 years after the original film – which sees a plucky intern thrown into the glossy world of magazines, glamour and one iconic, terrifying editor – its stars have reunited for a nostalgic revisit to the world of Runway.
Blunt’s relationship with co-star Stanley Tucci evolved since they starred together in the first movie, after Tucci married her sister Felicity after meeting her at Blunt’s own wedding to John Krasinski, which was held at George Clooney's estate in Lake Como, no less. When I ask Blunt if it's truly possible to see too much of Tucci, she replies “never”. “Now I know when he's cooking or shaking up a martini,” she smiles, adding that she’s also stayed in contact with co-stars Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway (referred to lovingly as “Annie”) over the years, calling time with them “effortless” and Hathaway “an easy-peasy scene partner”. “I love the alchemy of everyone together, it just works,” she says.
So why now, why this sequel, why this script? “We'd heard mutterings and rumblings of a sequel for years,” Emily explains, describing the final product as a “nostalgia bank”. “I think it's wonderful that they waited 20 years… It’s a whole new world for these characters to have to contort themselves into or evolve – or devolve, with regards to my character…”
She is referring to the delicious villainous arc her character has in the sequel. As Anne Hathaway’s Andy rejoins the Runway team (to the dismay of Meryl Streep’s Miranda), we see that Emily is a hotshot at Dior. The plot unfolds with a plan to save the magazine from folding to the fate of social media content and clickbait – and while Emily seems to be on the good guy’s team, she’s also 100% serving her own agenda. This sees her go toe to toe with Miranda Priestley herself.
“It's a great dynamic to play,” Emily says of this plot line. “Because suddenly Miranda's beholden to Emily, and I think Emily loves that dynamic, but yet I think her insecurity and her desperate need for Mummy's love just overwhelms her ability to hold court. I think that's what she wants. She wants Miranda to say, ‘You are it. You are talented. And I don't think that will happen.”
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We talk about the relationship we have with our own validation, and whether we can ever get it from others. Emily explains that her character will “go to any length” to get it. “I think what she really needs is connection,” Emily adds, describing the relationship between her character and Anne Hathaway’s Andy as “the love story in the movie”. “I think Andy is potentially one of her first friends,” she says. “I think they’re really honest with each other and could have a good friendship."
On her quest for world domination, Emily also recruits a new boyfriend to back her plans. When Glamour asks if this character – a wealthy tycoon who talks of going into space – is based on Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, she laughs and neither confirms nor denies.
Blunt’s Emily is undoubtedly the comic highlight of the entire film, with her deadpan delivery and impeccable timing. From whispered bitchy asides during a funeral, to hiring a beautician to take a “lawnmower to her beau's hairy chest”, her unapologetic disdain is both hilarious and reflective of the industry she worships.
She credits Devil Wears Prada writer Aline Brosh McKenna – screenwriter of both the original movie and the sequel – as her “comedy heaven”, supplying great ideas and giving her the space to adlib. “She writes incredible, funny dialogue and she lets me chuck the kitchen sink at it, throw in lines and adlib. I think it’s really good with comedy to have that kind of spontaneity.”
One Emily quip that cut close to the bone is “remember when magazines were a thing?”. Much of the film’s plot revolves around the shift in magazine journalism to clickbait, influencers and less meaty exploratory features. The decision to draw on the reality of the media industry – and how difficult it is to survive in it – was deliberate.
“Everyone's feeling the squeeze of it and the fear of it,” Emily says of the shifting media landscape. “I think it was a great thing to make that a poignant part of the movie, it deepens the movie… “Everything’s changed,” she says, telling Glamour: “It’s what you guys are contending with, it’s what we’re contending with as actors.”
Another heavy mantle the film franchise carries is that of body positivity, something that is a subject of critique and controversy in the fashion and media industries. There are even jokes and anecdotes around weight loss jabs.
“We had to mention Ozempic at some point,” Emily tells Glamour. “It seems to be in the ether wherever you go.” She adds that the film does include conversations about body positivity, as well as Miranda’s way of misunderstanding or trivialising the topic by calling it “body negativity”. For Emily, though, body positivity in the fashion world has come a long way since Devil Wears Prada was released in 2006. “It has evolved so much,” she says. “It used to be rather uninspiring for certain body shapes. It just wasn't interesting, it wasn't fun. And I think now it's so much more inclusive. It's more gender inclusive. Men are having more fun with what they wear. Men, when I first did this movie, they just wore a suit on the red carpet. I think the boys are crushing it now and having fun with it.”
Since playing Emily the first time around in Devil Wears Prada – one of her first big movie roles, she has gone on to play Mary Poppins and star alongside her husband in clever horror franchise A Quiet Place. So has she applied any Emily-isms from her iconic character to her own life in the last 20 years?
“I have not applied her in my real life, because I think that would not be wise,” she says. “I hope I'm quite different from that. But I do love that her general state is one of outrage. She's just outraged all the time, it’s a funny thing to play.”
Emily also shares two daughters with Krasinski, and when conversations were had about how her character’s role as a mother would be written, she wanted nuance.“We talked about it, could she be a terrible mother? I said, ‘What if she's not? What if she loves it? What if she loves those kids? And she can gloat about them and brag about them, but maybe she's good at it.’” In the film, we see her FaceTime her anxious daughter from Milan and guides her through EFT head tapping to calm her, and it’s adorable. We see Emily’s softness, however brief, existing alongside all of her ambition and sass.
Perhaps unlike her Devil Wears Prada alter-ego, though, Blunt has learned a set of rather zen lessons of self-possession and protection since playing her first time around. “You really realise you have one precious life, and it's yours,” she says. “It’s yours to live however you choose. I've also learned the importance of holding stuff back for myself and not feeling that you have to be a zoo exhibit… I chase environments where I can be really humanised and normalised. That has become vital to me.”
