Anne Hathaway remembers Meryl Streep's improvisation on “The Devil Wears Prada”

“I remember seeing Meryl come up with 18 different lines on the spot," the actress says in a new interview with former costar Emily Blunt.

Although The Devil Wears Prada was based on a novel, many of the fashion film's most iconic lines came out of the production process. In a new interview with her former costar Emily Blunt for Variety's Actors on Actors series, Anne Hathaway recalls how Meryl Streep (who starred as Miranda Priestly, a fashion magazine editor loosely based on Vogue chief Anna Wintour) would often come up with her own suggestions for her character.

“I remember seeing Meryl come up with 18 different lines on the spot," Hathaway told Blunt in the new interview. "Stanley Tucci was doing the same, and you. I was just like this kindergartner who was like, 'How are they all so good?'”

For her part, Blunt described her experience on The Devil Wears Prada as "a joy bomb of a time." Her performance as magazine assistant Emily Charlton was her breakthrough role, and Blunt says the movie is still "quoted to me every week."

When EW reunited Hathaway, Blunt, and the rest of the main cast for an oral history of The Devil Wears Prada timed to its 15th anniversary in 2021, they gave even more details about what some of that creative improvisation entailed.

"We attempted [saying] 'Tits in!'" Tucci told EW, about the scene where Priestly's imminent arrival throws the magazine staff into a panic. "That was one I made up, but every time we laughed. 'Gird your loins!' is better."

That unpredictability went beyond the dialogue to the way those lines were delivered. Hathaway, who expected Streep to be "barking orders" as Priestly, told EW "I almost fell off my chair" when the older actress spoke her lines in a whisper instead.

"It was a direct steal from the way I saw Clint Eastwood run a set," Streep, who starred alongside Eastwood in his 1995 film The Bridges of Madison County, told EW. "He's someone that guys really respect, and he never raises his voice, ever; the one time that he did, it so terrified people for two weeks, they were traumatized."

You can watch EW's Devil Wears Prada cast reunion above, or read it here.

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