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.
