Aline Brosh McKenna Talks Fan Service and Fashion in Devil Wears Prada 2 — Thats All!

Aline Brosh McKenna always seemed aware that writing a sequel to The Devil Wears Prada would be a dangerously narrow runway to walk. That’s probably why, as recently as three years ago, she wasn’t particularly keen on the idea. But when Meryl Streep says she’s thinking about revisiting one of her most famous roles, what’s a screenwriter to do?

It took 20 years after they released one of the most impactful comedies of the 21st century to get the entire band back together. But, as McKenna says, once she met with Streep… things moved very quickly. “Meryl’s opinion is enormously important,” says McKenna, whose other credits include 27 Dresses, Morning Glory, We Bought a Zoo and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. “And when she said she would be open to hearing some ideas, by that point, we had accumulated a lot of them.

During a recent episode ofThe Hollywood ReporterpodcastI’m Having an Episode(Spotify,Amazon Music,Apple), McKenna talked about building the wildly different but similarly glamorous world of The Devil Wears Prada, riffed on how elements of the original have aged and why one “That’s all” was enough.

When we spoke in early 2023, Emily Blunt and Anne Hathaway were really pushing the idea of a sequel. I asked if you were interested and you said, “Not really.”

I know! That’s right around the time when I started thinking about it. I follow all three of those industries: journalism, fashion, publishing, all fields that I love and maybe, in another world, would have worked in. As those fields have gotten turned upside down, I’ve always wondered. “What are these four characters doing in a world where how we make money is different?” The social values of workplaces have changed. The world has just changed so much in 20 years. Then I started calling David Frankel and saying, “You know what? I have some thoughts.” But the key to it, always, was finding a spot where Meryl was excited about it.

So how do you get Meryl Streep excited?

I wanted to get her thoughts early. So, I was excited to go see her and talk to her about it. It just so happened that we went to see her on a night when Lin-Manuel [Miranda] was doing a screening of it at the theater in Washington Heights that he was raising money for. I hadn’t seen it in the theater in years. And we had just spent the day talking about where these characters would be. It felt like kismet.

We live in this culture where there’s an expectation that if people like something — a series, a movie, a book — they feel entitled to more of it. And this has led to some great work. It has also led to a lot of work that maybe wasn’t needed. Among your collective, what was your barometer for deciding that the movie needed to be made — that this was not us just feeding into reboot and sequel culture?

I’m a big fan of movies from the 30s and 40s. And if something worked, they kept doing it. Even if it was just the same actors, even if it was just Hepburn and Tracy, if it was something that an audience responded to, they would make multiples. The idea that you can take existing material and recombine it and update it, that doesn’t offend me. And, in this case, we weren’t asked. The impetus didn’t come from Disney. The impetus was Wendy [Finerman], who produced the original, bringing to our attention that Meryl would like to talk about it. So it felt like how you build any movie. It came from a story that we were excited to tell. There was nothing cynical or calculated going into it, except my own desire as a fan just to go and revisit this.

Which you’ve thought about a lot over the years, I’m guessing.

I’ve thought of Miranda Priestly many times over the last 20 years. Anytime you’re in a situation which is a little irritating… you get the wrong coffee order or somebody is sitting in your plane seat. It’s just always fun to imagine what Miranda would have to say.

There was always going to be a lot of expectations on this project, but were you prepared for the scrutiny during production? It felt like the paparazzi photos from the set last summer were such an event.

I didn’t anticipate that. I haven’t generally worked on stuff that was anticipated while we were making it. No one was standing around excited about 27 Dresses. It’s a completely different circumstance. But I was really surprised by the crowds. We were shooting over the summer. It was great weather. We were all over the city. Even if people hadn’t looked it up online, sometimes they would just walk by and see it. It felt so New York-y. We’re all craving a communal experience. That movie is a shared experience, a shared memory from a time when things were different. There was more of a monoculture. There’s a yearning for a feeling of solidarity and community and everyone talking about the same movie. That’s something to hold on to.

How does the novelty of such anticipation impact the writing process? How much are you considering the need to include fan service, but not getting carried away with it?

For me, I like it when something plays as fan service, but you don’t need to know [that’s what it is]. You don’t have to have seen the first movie to enjoy this movie. And if you get the reference and you remember what it’s from, great. In a way, that makes the references more fun. This is a friend. If you think of it as a friend you’ve had for 20 years, you have private jokes — an example being “That’s all,” which became a catch-all catchphrase. As a little Easter egg, I believe we only say “That’s all” once. We thought a lot about where to put that “That’s all.”

If memory serves, the original movie was at least at some point mislabeled as a rom-com. It very clearly is not. How do you think of it, in terms of genre?

I have definitely written traditional rom-coms. I think it’s the tone — the sort of optimism and the comedy which you associate with romantic comedy. So it’s always had a little tinge of that. But women in the workplace is just a real fascination for me. Always has been. I just read the biography of Claire McCardell, the designer. I’m reading Judy Bloom’s biography right now. Very simply, I think they were models for me. It’s those stories, those movies: Working Girl, Broadcast News, even ones that aren’t about female protagonists. Tootsie is an extremely important movie for me. And it’s a workplace comedy in many ways. It’s about somebody who needs a job. I always craved those stories as much as my Jane Austen, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Brontë. I just love the idea of the workplace as a theater for emotion and morality.

How brand-conscious are you when you’re writing the fashion part of this? The brands that show up in the film are a big part of it. Are you thinking about LVMH while you’re writing it?

No. Although in this movie, we are definitely using more real designers. We had to invent a designer in the first movie, sort of by necessity. The idea is always to look at it from an outsider’s perspective. That’s how I look at it. I’m a girl from New Jersey. One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons is a woman wearing a shirt that reads DKNJ. The caption says “Donna Karen’s nightmare.” I always felt very seen by that because I grew up trying to magpie together something fabulous for myself. This movie is not an ad. This is not endorsing any particular designer or design sensibility. While it’s very important to be authentic, it’s not a click-and-shop movie.

There’s been a real reframing of Adrian Grenier’s character in the first film as a sort of villain. What is your read on that?

I’ve been asked about that a lot. My experience of coming to New York was that there was a lot of sensitivity about selling out if you were in a creative community. That is less prevalent now. It’s probably more prevalent in Gen X than in millennials overall. But when I started out, I really wanted to write commercial comedies. That’s what I loved. And I remember feeling, in the early 90s, “My God, am I a sellout?” There were certainly people who told me that I was. And I really don’t think you can impugn [Nate’s] motivations. She’s becoming a different person with different values than the person she’s dating. He’s there to remind her that it’s a Faust story and that she’s slipping down the drain. That’s what he’s there to do. I wanted to create somebody who had that incredible ferocity of purity that you have in your 20s. Nate’s character is sort of the avatar of someone who understands that Andy is pushing her moral boundaries. That’s his role in the story. It is interesting to me that it’s taken on that light, but the idea of selling out has really changed. We’re in a world where the economic climate is such that it’s so hard to survive. We went from “Don’t sell out” to “Get your bag, girl.”

The original movie had one of the more memorable makeover scenes in cinema. That was a mainstay of my moviegoing for years. We don’t see makeover montages anymore. What’s your take on that?

It’s an interesting makeover in Prada because it’s not “homely to sexy.” It’s “unfashionable to fashionable.” One of the things I love about fashion is that some of the things that a patriarchal society tells women — a big bosom, for instance — fashion rejects that. There are things which are stereotypically desirable that fashion will turn on its head. Like five years ago, everyone had fake eyelashes on, right? Now all the shows this season, no mascara. There’s a type of makeover where you take a woman and you transform her from a female gaze object to a male gaze object. That really wasn’t what the first movie was doing. It wasn’t making her sexier. It was giving her the keys to this locked room.

So much in fashion has changed, aesthetically, between the two movies.

I find it interesting and ultimately funny how these things change. Thick eyebrows, thin eyebrows, yes, eyelashes! No eyelashes! Dropped waist, high waist. It’s always moving, these little barometers of style all over the place. But, for fashion, it’s obviously somewhat about sex appeal, but it’s also not. It’s about understanding what a silhouette means. What does a drop waist in the 1920s mean? What does big shoulder pads in the 80s mean? The return of massive amounts of volume in the last couple of years that we’ve seen. What does that mean? Now things are slimming down again.

Don’t tell me that. I’ve really over-indexed on billowy pants.

Well, we’re doing it to men too! Men are very slow moving in terms of silhouettes.

Before I let you go… does The Devil Wears Prada 2 coming out on May 1 get you an invite to the Met Gala three days later?

I highly, highly doubt that. (Laughs.) I mean, that it’s a good example of what we did with the first movie. We had a version of the Met Ball, and I don’t think that everyone knew what that was at the time. Now that’s the Super Bowl or The Oscars for so many people. People sit down with their popcorn to watch arrivals. I’ll be watching.