Tonight’s Screen Actors Guild Awards, just in case you haven’t heard, is also doubling as a cast reunion for The Devil Wears Prada, and—as it seems we won’t be getting a sequel anytime soon—we’re excited about it.
Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, and Emily Blunt’s reunion onstage to present the SAG Award for outstanding performance by a male actor in a comedy series 18 years after the film’s debut saw the three women get back into character, quoting lines from the film with aplomb. (The power trio ultimately got to present the award to Jeremy Allen White of The Bear, who said he was "struck" at receiving the award from the three women all together.)
This isn't The Devil Wears Prada's first turn at this particular awards ceremony: in 2007, Streep earned a SAG Award nomination for her role as Runway magazine editor-in-chief Miranda Priestly; Hathaway played Andrea “Andy” Sachs and Blunt played Emily Charlton, both of whom were assistants to the character of Miranda at Runway.
Appropriately, Streep wore Prada for the occasion tonight; Hathaway wore a cerulean blue gown, a nod to a famous line from The Devil Wears Prada. In a moment where Miranda put Andy firmly in her place, referencing Andy's perceived lack of interest in fashion, Miranda said (with deep disdain) "Oh. Okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select, I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise, it's not lapis, it's actually cerulean. And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns..." Hathaway's nod to the line is quite brilliant.
Onstage, as Streep opened the envelope that contained the winner's name, Blunt joked and quoted the line from the film: "By all means, move at a glacial pace," Blunt said, quoting a famous line from Miranda. "You know that thrills me."
Hathaway told E!'s Laverne Cox that Streep personally invited her to present at the SAG Awards with her. “Meryl said, ‘Do you think you can make it to the SAG Awards?' and I told her, ‘I will do anything to be there,'” Hathaway said, per The Hollywood Reporter.
“We just had a joy bomb of a time on that movie,” Blunt said at Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series in December, which she attended with Hathaway. “I don’t know if any of us knew it was going to become what it did. It’s quoted to me every week. It will be the movie that changed my life.”
(We’re pretty sure you’ve seen it, but) The film centers around Andy, an up-and-coming journalist who reluctantly takes a job as Miranda's assistant despite having pretty much zero interest in fashion. This “amuses, horrifies, and ultimately disrupts (for better or worse) the majority of Priestly’s staff,” Entertainment Weekly reports.
The Devil Wears Prada was nominated for two Oscars—one for Streep’s performance, and the other for Patricia Field’s costume design—grossed $327 million at the worldwide box office, and became “a modern classic for breaking down gendered lines that often constrained female-driven Hollywood productions set in the workplace,” Entertainment Weekly writes.
“Because they’d given us such straitened circumstances to make the film with a smaller budget, this opened up and said that a ‘chick flick’ can be a huge hit with a broad audience,” Streep said. “This is the first movie [where] men have come up to me and said, ‘I know how you felt. I have a company, and nobody understands me. It’s really hard.’ It’s the hardest thing in the world for a man to feel his way through to the protagonist of the film if it’s a woman.”
On a recent episode of the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast, Blunt said that there has “never” been a big push to create a sequel to the 2006 film. “Some things should be cherished and preserved in this bubble, and it’s okay,” Blunt told host Josh Horowitz, adding that the cast is “good” with any decision (or not) to move forward with a second film—and that Streep is in “‘If I don’t have to lose the weight,’” Blunt said, quoting her costar. “But I think she said, ‘the f—king weight.’”
Blunt herself, in a 2018 interview with People, that she didn’t think a sequel was likely, but added “I almost hope it doesn’t [happen] because I think sometimes when you sequel everything kind of dilutes how special the original is.” But four years later, in 2022, Blunt told The View she would sign up for a sequel “in a heartbeat just to play with those guys again.”
For Hathaway’s part, she said on The View in 2022 that she didn’t “know if there can be” a sequel: “I just think that movie was in a different era, you know?” she said. “Now, everything’s gone so digital, and that movie centered around the concept of producing a physical thing. It’s just very different now.”
Blunt is nominated at the SAG Awards tonight for outstanding performance by a female actor in a supporting role, as well as outstanding performance by a cast in a motion picture, both for Oppenheimer. Streep’s show Only Murders on the Building is nominated for outstanding performance by an ensemble in a comedy series.
