Emily Blunt was 22 years old when she first stole the show from Meryl Streep. It was her second-ever film, she’d only walked into the casting because she was auditioning for children’s fantasy Eragon in the room next door, and she could never have predicted that The Devil Wears Prada – a project considered so risky in its depiction of Anna Wintour that nobody in the fashion world would touch it – would become a phenomenon.
Yes, Anne Hathaway was Andrea “Andy” Sachs, the plucky ingenue lead; and Streep was the star draw as Miranda Priestly, whose savage put-downs about cerulean blue and “florals for spring” are now immortal. But it was Blunt – the uptight, sneering British assistant, who lived and breathed Runway magazine, sacrificed her health, sanity and social life at the altar of fashion and survived on a diet of oxygen and cubes of cheese – who made the film iconic.
“I love my job, I love my job, I love my job,” she said, at death’s door, with her head in her hands, in what has grown into an ironic mantra for burned-out millennials. Emily could have been yet another bitchy frenemy of a thousand romcoms past, but Blunt made her something quite different.
Yes, she was intimidating, frequently patronising, and despaired openly at Andy’s ignorance about fashion, and yes she unravelled spectacularly when she wasn’t sent to Paris Fashion Week.
Emily Blunt’s turn as long-suffering assistant Emily Charlton in ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ was comedy gold (Photo: 20th Century Studios)But she was also vulnerable, desperate, kind – she had a hint of silliness and rebellion threatening to pierce her icy surface, and rather than sabotage Andy, she steered her course to spare her humiliation. To her own detriment, she sincerely believed the magazine and her job were a matter of life and death – but Blunt did not make her look a fool for that. She also got the best lines in the film – “I’m just one stomach flu away from my goal weight” – delivered with Blunt’s now-trademark cold, stony stare. You always get the feeling Blunt bursts into hysterical laughter the moment the director says “cut”.
Twenty years later and Blunt has done it again. The nostalgic and affectionate The Devil Wears Prada 2 recaptures the spirit of the original and is uncomfortably accurate in its portrayal of the demise of print journalism. The clothes are fabulous, the caper quite absurd, the cast emotionally reunited. But Priestly is a little less terrifying than before – much like Wintour herself, who endorsed this sequel by appearing alongside Streep on the cover of Vogue.
Emily, now a divorced mother of two, heading up marketing at Dior and draped over a slightly stupid billionaire, is its highlight: once again, Blunt steals every scene she’s in. Withering, disdainful, vengeful, proud, and somehow still warm – Emily is a gentle send-up of the Briton who has slightly lost the plot after too many years in woo-woo, wellness America. “May the bridges I burn light my way,” she reminds herself, in under-eye patches, tapping her serene face to manage her stress and overwhelm.
It has been a very long time since Emily Blunt was an underdog. Now 43, she is worth about $80 million. She has become an action star thanks to mega-blockbusters Looper, Sicario and Edge of Tomorrow, but her career has spanned indie (her debut My Summer of Love, last year’s The Smashing Machine) to period drama (The Young Victoria) to prestige TV Western (The English) to thriller (The Girl on the Train, her husband John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place franchise) to Disney (Mary Poppins Returns).
She was Oscar-nominated – at last – for her performance as Kitty Oppenheimer in 2024. She had mere minutes of screen time in Nolan’s sprawling, three-hour biopic yet gave depth and complexity to the physicist’s sidelined, misunderstood wife, who suppressed her ambition and intelligence and career in service to her husband’s genius. This summer, she will lead Steven Spielberg’s secretive UFO film, Disclosure Day.
By any metric, Blunt is one of the most successful actors of her generation – and certainly one of Britain’s greatest Hollywood exports, who has retained her sardonic charm and self-deprecation even as her accent has grown transatlantic. And yet I left The Devil Wears Prada 2 feeling short-changed. I have missed this Blunt – playful, haughty, and hilariously funny. Her comic talent has been wasted.
Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt in Christopher Nolan’s epic, ‘Oppenheimer’ (Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures)We all know action films are where the money is – and Blunt, athletic, empathetic, intense and considerably more expressive than the films’ scant dialogue, makes them compelling. Certainly, she makes them more appealing to women like me who often dismiss that genre as big, loud, testosterone-fuelled carnage.
“Serious” drama, meanwhile, like Hugo Blick’sThe English, Nolan’s Oppenheimer, or Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine, is where respect and recognition lie, and there, again, Blunt steals the show. Even when she is – far too often – second fiddle to a male lead, or given a character and script that does not match her talent.
Comedies, however, often fall by the wayside in a great Hollywood career. They are a stepping stone as a star begins to rise, before they decide they want to be taken seriously, or a victory lap after they’ve proven their worth and want to have some fun. But these are the films that give us the most joy and the ones that we most treasure. What a shame that with a couple of exceptions (most recently 2024’s riot The Fall Guy, in which she starred as stunt man Ryan Gosling’s action director ex, with fabulous chemistry, and a willingness to submit to the totally daft) in Blunt’s career they have been overlooked.
They might not always be hard-hitting, but they often are the most human, and since Blunt was in her early twenties she has been able to bring emotion and redemption to characters that others would make villains and clowns. In 2006, it was her wry, ridiculous humour that upstaged Meryl Streep and made The Devil Wears Prada a comedy classic. Its sequel, in which she is third on the billing, confirms she has the power to do it again – and that her great comic gift has been wasted on action movies.
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