Meryl Streep reveals Anne Hathaway's casting rule for ‘Devil Wears Prada 2'

Meryl Streep has revealed that Anne Hathaway made a direct intervention with producers of The Devil Wears Prada 2 over the body sizes of models in the film, getting a promise that the casting would not look like what she witnessed on the real Milan Fashion Week runways.

Speaking to Harper's Bazaar in an interview published on Wednesday, 25 March, Streep, 76, described attending actual fashion shows during Milan Fashion Week as research for the sequel. 

What she saw gave her pause. 

"I was struck by how not only beautiful and young, everyone seems young to me, but alarmingly thin the models were," she said. 

"I thought that all had been addressed years ago."

Hathaway, 43, apparently had the same reaction, and acted on it immediately. 

"Annie clocked it too," Streep continued, "and she made a beeline to the producers about it, securing promises that the models in the show that we were putting together for our film would not be so skeletal!" 

Streep's verdict on her co-star was unambiguous: "She's a stand-up girl."

Elsewhere in the interview, Streep reflected on the extraordinary public reaction to filming the sequel on location in New York City last summer, alongside returning cast members including Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci. 

The level of attention caught even her off guard. 

"Even though we were aware of the impact of the first film two decades ago, I think none of us were prepared for the ambush of both goodwill and avid attention that engulfed us," she said. 

"We needed police barriers and crowd control." 

On the subject of her acting approach, Streep confirmed she has left method acting well behind. She recalled the misery of trying it for the original film. 

"I was [miserable] in my trailer. I could hear them all rocking and laughing. I was so depressed!" she told Entertainment Weekly in 2021. "That's the last time I ever attempted a Method thing."

The Devil Wears Prada 2 opens in cinemas on 1 May.