Meryl Streep initially turned down The Devil Wears Prada until producers agreed to her one demand.
“They called me up, and they made an offer, and I said, ‘No. Not going to do it,’” Streep, 76, said, grinning as she recalled the phone call during an interview with Today on Wednesday.
Streep, of course, was indispensable to the original film as the fearsome fashion designer Miranda Priestley. After helping the 2006 movie gross more than $325 million at the box office—and earning a Golden Globe award and Oscar nomination for her performance—Streep knew her value to the blockbuster sequel.
“I knew it was going to be a hit, and I wanted to see if I doubled my ask,” she gleefully explained. “And they went right away and said, ‘Sure.’”
Noting that she was in her 50s at the time, she added, “It took me this long to understand that I could do that! They needed me, I felt.”
The Devil Wears Prada 2, which opens on May 1, is eyeing a $100 million opening, primarily thanks to its returning stars from the original, including Streep, Anne Hathaway, Stanley Tucci, and Emily Blunt.
“I was ready to retire. That was a lesson,” she added, somewhat facetiously. Two decades later, Streep has signed on for three upcoming projects, including a hotly anticipated biopic of the singer Joni Mitchell.
“They started talking about a sequel, but we all waited until we had that good idea,” Streep continued.
“I think we all had to do it as well—you got to have all four of us come back,” Blunt, 43, who plays Preistly’s first assistant in the original, Emily Charlton, said. “There were mutterings and rumblings for years.”
Streep and the film’s director, David Frankel, admitted that procuring a blockbuster budget for a female-led film was “difficult.” Even if that female lead has 21 Oscar nominations.
The sequel’s budget “mostly went to them,” Frankel, 67, said in an interview with the New York Times, gesturing to the cast. “So the making of the movie was kind of similar. We were always scrapping, and it was never enough. But that’s normal, every movie.”
“That’s not true. The movies that are about women, there’s a much bigger fight than there is for Chris Nolan or something,” Streep interrupted. “I love him, and I’d love to work with him, but—"
“Meryl’s right. There’s an expectation that movies about women have a limited box office, and so based on that the studios say, ‘OK, here’s how much you get,’” the Marley & Me director corrected. “And there are other movies where it’s presumed unlimited box office, and so the budget is unlimited. And we did go through that again, even on the scale of this movie.”
“We’ll find out who is right,” he concluded.
