Hollywood’s greatest living actress, Meryl Streep, is setting the record straight—on and off screen.
Just as in The Devil Wears Prada, when she educated her fashion-averse assistant that her sweater was not blue, but rather cerulean, Streep, 76, is correcting fans who misidentify the real-life inspiration behind her terrifying fashion editor, Miranda Priestly.
Since the film’s release in 2006, fans have largely believed that Priestly was a parody of famed Vogue editor Anna Wintour, but Streep—perhaps unconvincingly—declared that it was not so.
“I was just basically imitating Mike Nichols that whole time,” Streep, who was wearing the iconic cerulean, cable-knit sweater from the film, told Stephen Colbert on The Late Show on Wednesday.
Streep worked with the EGOT-winning director of The Graduate on three films—Silkwood, Heartburn, and Postcards from the Edge—two of which earned her Academy Award nominations.
“If Mike Nichols and Clint Eastwood had a baby, it would be Miranda Priestly," Streep joked.
“I’d watch that movie,” Colbert, 61, quipped.
Streep said that she pulled Preistly’s slyness from the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? director, who was known for getting the best out of actors through his witty authority.
The actress, who is reprising her role in the film’s forthcoming sequel, said she cited the two directors for their “command on set.”
“Mike would do it with sort of a sly humor, and Miranda has—she knows that what she’s saying is sort of snide, but she knows it’s kind of funny, too," Streep said.
Nichols, who passed in 2014, earned a staggering 42 Oscar nominations in his career—twice as many as Streep. He first developed his on-set demeanor through early work in comedy and improvisation before moving into film directing.
“And that little way of doing things, people take as mean, but it’s funny, you know,” she added, erupting the audience in laughter. “I think it’s funny.”
Streep said she derived Preistly’s quiet command from Eastwood, 95, who directed and starred alongside the actress in the Oscar-nominated The Bridges of Madison County in 1995.
“Clint never would raise his voice. He would direct, and people had to lean forward to hear what he was saying,” she said.
“He’d say, ‘Well, that was alright. I think let’s move on,’” she said, feigning terror at his on-set authority.
“He’d often shoot the rehearsal and then move on. So, his crew was on the balls of their feet,” she added. “No one was sitting down except me.”
Preistly’s most frightening quote is also her quietest. During a styling session, where assistants are running around to grab the right accessories, Streep delivers the line, “Why is no one ready?” with chilling frigidity.
Colbert called it a “strange calmness.”
Two decades later, Streep said she still hasn’t told Eastwood about how he influenced her power-wielding editor.
“But I told Mike, and he was thrilled," she concluded.
Despite not directly drawing inspiration from Wintour, 76, Streep and the fashion editor are not so dissimilar.
On Thursday, Ancestry.com revealed that, after “billions of historical records and public family trees,” the actress and the British editor are related, sharing fifth great-grandparents.
In another astonishing connection, the pair’s distant relatives lived just 20 miles from Allentown, Pennsylvania, the hometown of The Devil Wears Prada author Lauren Weisberger.
The revelation comes just one month before the film’s sequel, The Devil Wears Prada, premieres on May 1.
