None of them won the SAG Awards they richly deserved for their performances, but the three lead actresses of The Devil Wears Prada finally got their moment onstage. Reuniting 18 years after the release of their now iconic comedy, Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, and Emily Blunt—also nominated tonight for her turn in Oppenheimer—once again made for a trio nearly as groundbreaking as florals for spring.
Streep took the stage first, stumbling over the microphone as Idris Elba introduced her, and claiming she had forgotten the envelope and her glasses before Hathaway and Blunt took the stage to rescue her. Streep was in the center, but it was Hathaway and Blunt who got to pull out some of Miranda Priestly’s best lines — “No no, that wasn‘t a question” for Hathaway, and “By all means, move at a glacial pace, you know how that thrills me” for Blunt. All three seemed barely able to contain their giggles as they presented the best actor in a comedy series Emmy to Jeremy Allen White for The Bear.
Hathaway took the stage in an archival Atelier Versace gown that could only be described, as Laverne Cox did on the E! red carpet show, as “cerulean” — truly what other color could she have worn? And Streep was similarly on theme, wearing — of course — Prada. Blunt wore a red custom Louis Vuitton gown, what’s become a signature color for her this season.
The Devil Wears Prada, an adaptation of Lauren Weisberger’s 2003 novel, was not expected to be anything but a frothy summer comedy when it opened on June 30, 2006. It’s hard to remember now, but Streep was not considered a box office draw or even particularly funny; her most successful films over the past decade had been emotional dramas like The Hours and Music of the Heart, and aside from her supporting turn in Adaptation, attempts at having fun, like Prime and the pulpy Manchurian Candidate, weren’t especially well received.
Hathaway, on the other hand, was very much a rising star, with a buzzy turn in Brokeback Mountain a year earlier that helped her move on from her fluffy Princess Diaries era and closer to an A-list tier. And if you knew who Emily Blunt was in 2006, you were either a fan of the 2004 British indie My Summer of Love or caught her 2006 TV movie Gideon’s Daughter, which earned her a Golden Globe the following year.
All this is to say that nobody would have called these three an iconic trio when the film opened, but it didn’t take long for the accolades to start rolling in. The Devil Wears Prada was a smash summer hit and later would bust the Academy’s long-standing bias against comedic performances by earning Streep her 14th Oscar nomination. As so many comedies do, it’s only become more beloved since and now has a legion of fans who weren’t remotely old enough to see it in theaters the first time around, at least if TikTok is anything to go on.
That means that the SAG Awards onstage reunion was a gird-your-loins worthy event. Hathaway may be firm that there will never be a sequel—and if you are true with yourself, you probably don’t actually want one—but there’s no reason for this reunion not to become an annual awards season event.
