Fashion, Power, and Print Under Pressure: How Screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna Cracked “The Devil Wears Prada 2”

The Devil Wears Prada 2 begins with Anne Hathaway’s reporter character, Andy Sachs, getting fired by text just before taking the stage to accept a prestigious journalism award. A few days after the movie opened, a Washington Post editor watched her colleagues win a Pulitzer Prize for a story she’d worked on before being laid off via email. In this David Frankel-directed sequel, which opened to a whopping $77 million, the realities of a shrinking print media industry co-exist vividly alongside the still-glamorous New York City fashion world. The script by Aline Brosh McKenna excelled as an actor magnet, attracting original stars Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci back into the Devil Wears Prada universe.

Audiences are treating the characters’ reunion as a kind of communal ritual, according to McKenna. “I stopped by the movie theater on Sunday just to sit and laugh with folks, and it was so much fun,” she says. “Movies are not just a part of our imagination. They’re a part of our daily lives. Going to the movies is a date, it’s a get-together with your friends, it’s a shared human experience.”  

McKenna wrote the first Devil as well, adapting the Lauren Weisberger novel that drew on her stint at Vogue magazine under editor Anna Wintour, widely regarded as the role model for Streep’s imperious Miranda Priestly. Devil 2 also features fictional characters modeled after famous people. There’s a Jeff Bezos-like billionaire (Justin Theroux), his equally rich ex-wife (Lucy Liu), and the heir to a publishing empire (B.J. Novak) who’s happy to profit from the sale of his father’s legacy.

Speaking from Los Angeles, McKenna talks about how she helped get The Devil Wears Prada 2 off the ground nearly two decades after the first one, dissects the Miranda-Andy story hook, and celebrates the barely contained hysteria that makes Emily Blunt’s character so hilarious.

You’ve written a lot of successful movies, but The Devil Wears Prada 2 has to be your biggest box office hit, yeah?

Oh my God, yeah. Definitely.

When the first The Devil Wears Prada became a hit in 2006, did the studio immediately start begging for a sequel?

No, they didn’t. Lauren wrote a sequel book, but we didn’t pick up on it because it didn’t feel like the right time. 

Then what happened?

Many years went by. We’d made The Devil Wears Prada for a studio called Fox 2000, which was part of 20th Century Fox. Then, 20th Century Fox was sold to Disney, and Fox 2000 ceased to exist. So the movie [IP] was sort of lost in the same kind of corporate shuffle that the characters find themselves in The Devil Wears Prada 2.

So how did this sequel get off the ground?

We went to them and said, “Hey, we have some ideas, what do you think?” There was a new studio president now, and he loved the idea, so it was really like the stars had lined up again, once we’d found a way into the story.

“Finding a way into the story” – that’s the key because you need to give actors of this caliber something substantial to work with, right?

Oh yeah. Particularly Meryl. We had to make sure she liked the idea. When I pitched her, she locked right in and became a very helpful collaborator.

One big idea behind your narrative concerns the downsizing of print media, as magazines and newspapers struggle to survive.

What happened over the last 20 years is, like, what is a journalist anymore? And what is a high fashion magazine? Like, do those things even exist? Andy and Miranda are in a similar situation: the thing they love to do is under existential threat. So the little story notion is that they both have these viral moments at the beginning of the movie —spoiler alert, Andy loses her job—which causes them to need each other.

And you don’t waste any time laying out the obstacles. Within probably twelve minutes, Andy and Miranda join forces under duress.

You nailed it! Andy walks into the Runway magazine offices at minute twelve with her new job.

By capturing the zeitgeist, your story structure creates plausible conflicts and provides the actors with new character beats. Because you can’t get Meryl Streep onto a project if she’s just going to do the exact same thing she did before, right?

Well, I don’t think Miranda is fundamentally a different person, but she is dealing with different circumstances. Runway magazine is in trouble because she screwed up, and now Miranda has to apologize to people because now she’s living in a world where she can’t piss off advertisers anymore. She can’t take them for granted, so her power has been diminished. 

Miranda’s reduced circumstances make for great comedic fodder. The first movie celebrated this golden age of advertising-fueled magazine budgets, allowing for lavish perks.

The big lunches and the planes and the cars and the fancy photographers who would shoot things, and if they didn’t work, you would just toss them out.

You write a funny callback to the first Devil. where Miranda flings her coat onto the chair, expecting her assistant to pick it up. In this one, we see Miranda cope with the indignity of having to hang up her own coat!

It’s so exhausting! [laughing] Why should she be asked to hang up her coat? I think that you can’t throw your coats at people anymore. That’s not happening.

Emily Blunt cuts like a knife as Emily Charlton, who now works at Dior and controls valuable ad dollars. As she tells Miranda and Andy, “No us, no you.” How do you channel Emily Blunt when you’re writing Emily Charlton?

Emily Blunt has this intensity to her, so Emily Charlton has this intensity because of Emily Blunt. I mean, Emily Charlton is basically trying to hold her limbs together with tremendous effort, otherwise they’d go spinning out into space! Somebody elegant and beautiful but also filled with such desperation—that’s what Emily Blunt captures so well. Emily Charlton’s in a panic all the time, and there’s nothing funnier than a character who’s about to implode.

Stanley Tucci returns as Miranda’s stylish lieutenant, Nigel, who helps dress Andy for this fancy party in the Hamptons. It’s a big set piece packed with celebrity appearances. Did you know who would show up when you wrote the script? 

Well, I wrote this movie, but I was also one of the producers, so in choosing the cameos, we made a giant list and then tried to boil it down. That was more of a producing challenge than a writing challenge.

A significant portion of The Devil Wears Prada 2 was filmed in New York. As a producer, were you mindful of the impact a movie of this scale has on the local filmmaking community in terms of job creation?

Oh my god, yes. In the last three or four years, the Los Angeles downturn has been crushing, and New York too. I shot something there in 2021, and there were still a lot of people working. But when we made this movie, there were lots of people available. So yeah, making a movie of this scale felt like an event; it felt special. Morale [being what it is] in the business right now, we’re all looking for things that feel big and substantial with that kind of wish-fulfillment world that we all live in when we go to Hollywood movies. 

In the third act, everybody goes to Milan for fashion shows featuring glamorous clothes, designer Donna Versacci, and music from a huge pop star. Amid all the glitz, Miranda Priestly takes a walk alone at night through the city’s famous Galleria plaza. No assistants, no dialogue. It seems like there’s a certain depth to her character that we hadn’t seen before.

Oh, for sure. Miranda is contemplating her career and possibly a little bit of her mortality, and trying to understand not just her own circumstances, but where the world is going. Is there a place for her personally, and a place for the values that she’s always believed in and stood up for?

It’s quite the dramatic interlude.

And that was the very last thing we shot. I had swollen glands and was getting sick, so they shot that without me. I didn’t see the scene until the dailies, and just the way our gifted DP Florian Ballhaus photographed it is just so exquisite.

And then of course there’s Anne Hathaway. What’s she like to write and produce for?

She has an unbelievable face for the movie screen with these big, expressive eyes, and she’s incredibly intelligent. Annie’s also very sensitive to emotion and hilariously funny, so she can do the most intense drama and then play the silliest physical comedy. This whole group of the main four [Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci]—and all our actors, but particularly the main four—are dealing with a level of competence and professionalism and talent that’s really exceptional.

Featured image: (L-R): Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) and Andie Sachs (Anne Hathaway) in 20th Century Studios’ THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2. Photo by Macall Polay. © 2025 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.