Emily Blunt has confessed she found Meryl Streep genuinely intimidating during the making of The Devil Wears Prada, and Streep herself was happy to confirm why.
The original cast, Streep, Blunt, Anne Hathaway and Stanley Tucci, reunited for an SiriusXM Front Row hosted by Andy Cohen ahead of the sequel’s release.
When Cohen asked Blunt whether Streep had been difficult to approach on set, she did not hold back.
“I mean, on the first one, I was quite scared because I feel like you were in a zone,” she told her co-star directly. Streep’s response was immediate: “Oh, yeah. I was in that zone.”
Blunt elaborated on what that zone actually looked like in practice.
“She was in a Miranda zone,” she said. “Not impenetrable, but we could come up and tell you a funny story, but you wouldn’t do your extraordinary laugh that I normally heard.”
Streep explained her thinking behind the approach, describing a deliberate technique she developed in the film’s early days, staying near the camera between takes and maintaining a slight remove from the rest of the cast.
“The authority, the thing,” she said. She also brought up a recent conversation with Greta Gerwig about the same subject.
“She was saying the same thing. You know, they kind of don’t want you at the cast party, right? It’s like you have to have just a little bit of a barrier to feel like the boss.”
She described sitting alone in her trailer hearing everyone else having a great time in the make-up room. “I could hear from far away, they’re all having a great time,” she recalled.
Cohen and Streep landed on the same punchline simultaneously: “It’s lonely at the top.”
The Devil Wears Prada 2, in which Streep’s Miranda Priestly navigates the decline of print media and squares off against Blunt’s now-powerful character, opens in cinemas on 1 May.
