Aline Brosh McKenna on Writing 'The Devil Wears Prada' Script

The Hollywood scribe opens up about working with Meryl Streep—and inventing Miranda Priestly's comically savage insults.

Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada. (20th Century Fox/Everett Collection.)

Gird your loins.

A sequel to The Devil Wears Prada is reportedly in the works, with Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci in talks to reprise their roles—none more iconic than Streep’s icy editrix Miranda Priestly.

I mean, who can forget Miranda’s hilariously savage one-liners? They’re the stuff that memes are made of. “Florals? For Spring? Groundbreaking.” “The tales of your incompetence do not interest me.” “By all means, move at a glacial pace. You know how that thrills me.”

And the Cerulean Speech! I still get chills when I watch Miranda, queen of the fictional Runway magazine, school her assistant Andy Sachs (Hathaway) on high fashion’s trickle-down effect. Meryl deserved her 247th Academy Award for that monologue alone:

And speaking of Academy Awards, in hindsight it is preposterous how the organization had overlooked Aline Brosh McKenna—the clever young woman who wrote the scene, not to mention all those killer lines, not to mention the entire film—for a screenwriting nomination. While Brosh McKenna was snubbed, her fellow scribe Sacha Baron Cohen earned a nod for Borat, a comedy that has not aged nearly as well.

In a gift to Prada’s large and devoted fanbase, Brosh McKenna will pen the sequel’s script, Entertainment Weekly reports.

When I was researching Queen Meryl, my Streep biography, in 2018, I had the pleasure of speaking with the screenwriter about her experience adapting The Devil Wears Prada, the book-turned-movie that put her on the map. She went on to write the hit rom-com 27 Dresses and TV’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend starring Rachel Bloom.

I’m publishing my Brosh McKenna interview here for the first time. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.