The writer behind The Devil Wears Prada is setting the record straight about who was wrong and who was right in the iconic fashion film.
In the movie, an aspiring "serious journalist" named Andy (Anne Hathaway) falls into a job assisting hellbeast in Chanel Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), who also reportedly was behind many of Miranda's best moments. As Andy runs around New York finding unpublished manuscripts of Harry Potter and the belts that are precisely the right shade of blue, she also forgets to be a decent friend and girlfriend — she even misses a birthday celebration for her boyfriend, Nate (Adrian Grenier).
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After countless "Miranda emergencies," Nate and Andy's best friend Lily (Tracie Thoms) each separately call her out on her shit. Ultimately, it takes an ill-fated trip to Paris to bring Andy back to earth. She tosses her Miranda phone in a fountain and bids her fashion girl life au revoir.
Andy may have admitted she was less than her best self, but some fans saw things differently. A Buzzfeed article from 2016, titled "Andy's Friends In The Devil Wears Prada Were The Fucking Worst," spells it out pretty clearly. Shouldn't Nate and Andy's pals be more supportive of her first job, especially one that would look fantastic on her CV?
The writer of the movie, Aline Brosh-McKenna, says haters can take several seats. The Crazy Ex-Girlfriend co-creator was asked about the friends in The Devil Wears Prada during a panel pegged to the CW show's finale, and Brosh-McKenna did not hold back.
"[Andy is] the one who says she's a serious journalist. She's the one who tucks her serious articles into her folder. She's the one who wants to write about the janitor strike and she pitched it, she just shoves all that out the window very easily," the showrunner told the crowd at the panel. "And Nate, who gets the worst of [the internet flack], he's just pointing out that she's being a hypocrite, which she is."
Brosh-McKenna points to the changing times (and maybe how hard it is to find a job in today's economy?) with new sympathy for Andy.
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"What I think is interesting is that the world has changed in the last 12 years. So that I feel like the audience [back] then understood Miranda's the devil. She's the devil. So that handbag [Andy] gave her friend is from the devil," Brosh-McKenna said. "[Andy] goes to apologise to him because he was right. She was selling herself out and going down the wrong path. I think it's interesting now that we're [so] encouraging people to get what's yours that we don't see that she's Charlie Sheen in Wall Street. And you don't want her to be Gordon Gekko."
Plus, Brosh-McKenna points out: Lily calling out Andy for flirting with Simon Baker's Christian is justified completely.
"Her best friend [Lily] who yells at her in the gallery is not wrong. [Andy] goes and sleeps with a sleazy guy who's even sleazier than she knew. So I think it's really interesting that we prize success in a different way than we did even a dozen years ago."
However you feel about Andy's friends' reaction to her job, it's clear that Andy is happier with Miranda out of her life — though we wouldn't hate a follow-up film that has the two women cross paths once again. (The sequel to Lauren Weisberger's book, titled When Life Gives You Lululemons, follows fellow former Miranda assistant Emily.)
"We've tried," said Brosh-McKenna of a sequel. "But I think I’ve said what I needed to say."
Let "Andy's friends were right all along!" be the final words on this particular Devil Wears Prada controversy.
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