Anne Hathaway Once Shared That She Begged for a ‘Devil Wears Prada’ Sequel
Actor Anne Hathaway breathed new life into her career after starring in the hit film Devil Wears Prada. After the film’s successful run, she wasn’t quite ready to leave that world behind.
Anne Hathaway fought hard for ‘The Devil Wears Prada’
Hathaway confided that she fell in love with the Devil Wears Prada script almost as soon as she read it. The only obstacle was that the studio behind the film had several choices in mind other than Hathaway.
“We started negotiating with Annie to make a deal, and that didn’t go well with the studio.… We offered it to Rachel McAdams three times. The studio was determined to have her, and she was determined not to do it,” director David Frankel once told Entertainment Weekly.
Popsugar once reported that actors like Claire Danes and Juliette Lewis were also up for the part. But Hathaway’s persistence paid off, and she’d eventually find herself in the iconic role of Andy Sachs. To Hathaway, this might have been the film that was the most difficult for her to be cast in.
“I was the ninth choice for The Devil Wears Prada,” Hathaway once said on RuPaul’s Drag Race (via L’Officiel).
Anne Hathaway begged for a ‘Devil Wears Prada’ sequel
Hathaway’s Prada was both a critical and financial success. Fellow Prada star Meryl Streep believed that the film’s success facilitated change in the film industry, especially regarding movies comprised of mostly a female cast.
“Because they’d given us such straitened circumstances to make the film with a smaller budget, this opened up and said that a ‘chick flick’ can be a huge hit with a broad audience,” Streep said. “This is the first movie [where] men have come up to me and said, ‘I know how you felt; I have a company, and nobody understands me. It’s really hard.’ It’s the hardest thing in the world for a man to feel his way through to the protagonist of the film if it’s a woman.”
Given the film’s success, there were some talks of a potential Devil Wears Prada sequel. But the filmmaker felt it was better to leave it as a standalone picture.
“The studio] didn’t ask for [a sequel]. We had a meeting where we said, ‘What could we do if there was a sequel?’ Maybe it was stupid; we felt like, No, this story has been told,’ Frankel explained.
But the Princess Diaries star was someone who would’ve enjoyed seeing a sequel to her hit film. After the movie’s success, she pestered executives personally to inquire about a second film.
“I remember calling them after the fervour had died out in America, and Meryl Streep and I were on a press tour in Europe. I was having such a fun time talking about it all that I called up the executives at Fox who had championed it and I said, ‘Can we just come up with a story please?’ And they said ‘We’re working on it,’” Hathaway once told MTV News (via Female First).
Anne Hathaway feels a ‘Devil Wears Prada’ sequel would be difficult to make in the digital age
The world has changed a lot since Devil Wears Prada came out. But Hathaway felt that change might make it difficult for a Prada sequel to be made. The media of the 2020s isn’t the same as the media back in the mid 2000s.
“I just think that movie was in a different era. Now everything’s gone so digital and that movie is centered around the concept of producing a physical thing and it’s just, it’s just very different,” Hathaway said in an interview with The View.
But Hathaway revealed that the characters have stayed on her mind throughout the years, which makes revisiting that world again attractive.
“It is tempting to think about Andy and Emily needing to get Miranda her coffee and she’s somewhere in Europe. And then along the way they pick up Stanley Tucci in Italy, who’s at a restaurant. It’s tempting but I don’t think it’s going to happen,” she added.
