Emily Blunt has confessed that she found Meryl Streep really intimidating during the making of The Devil Wears Prada and Streep herself was happy to confirm why.
The original cast, Streep, Blunt, Anne Hathaway and Stanley Tucci, reunited for a SiriusXM Front row hosted by Andy Cohen ahead of the sequel’s release.
When Cohen asked Blunt if Streep had been difficult to approach on set, she didn’t hold back.
“I mean, on the first one I was pretty scared because I feel like you were in a zone,” she told her co-star straight up. Streep’s response was immediate: “Oh, yeah. I was in that zone.”
Blunt elaborated on what that zone actually looked like in practice.
“She was in a Miranda zone,” she said. “Not impenetrable, but we could come up and tell you a funny story, but you wouldn’t do your extraordinary laugh that I usually heard.”
Explaining her thinking behind the approach, Streep described a deliberate technique she developed in the early days of filming, staying close to the camera between takes and maintaining a slight distance from the rest of the cast.
“The authority, the matter,” she said. She also brought up a recent conversation with Greta Gerwig on the same topic.
“She said the same thing. You know, they kind of don’t want you at the cast party, right? It’s like you just have to have a little barrier to feel like the boss.”
She described sitting alone in her trailer and hearing everyone else enjoying themselves in the make-up room. “I could hear from afar, they’re all doing really well,” she recalled.
Cohen and Streep landed on the same punchline simultaneously: “It’s lonely at the top.”
The Devil Wears Prada 2in which Streep’s Miranda Priestly navigates the decline of print media and confronts Blunt’s now powerful character, opens in theaters on May 1.
