Why Meryl Streep Was Never The Same After The Devil Wears Prada
"The Devil Wears Prada" has remained in the public consciousness for more than a decade. It was an early breakout role for Emily Blunt, its roman a clef nature solidified most people's idea of what Anna Wintour is really like, and it taught us all the word "cerulean." For the 15th anniversary of the Faustian fashion film, Entertainment Weekly did an exhaustive oral history, gathering he stars and crew behind the film to reminisce about the last gasp of fashion monoculture.
Among the insights shared is that Michelle Pfeiffer, Glenn Close, and Catherine Zeta-Jones were all up for the role of Miranda Priestly, and an unnamed fashion insider prompted screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna to make everyone meaner than in her original draft. The film eventually proved controversial; the co-op boards of several posh Manhattan apartment complexes wouldn't let "Prada" film, for fear of offending Wintour and the role of Miranda Priestly changed the way Meryl Streep, already a multiple Oscar winner, acted from then on. Here's how filming "The Devil Wears Prada" changed Meryl Streep's acting style forever.
Meryl Streep gave up Method acting after Prada
Meryl Streep came up in a time in Hollywood where Method acting was very big. Built on concepts originally conceived by Russian theater luminary Konstantin Stanislavski and developed by acolyte Lee Stransberg, Method acting relies on becoming the character you are portraying rather than just acting the part, as well as evoking personal memories to flesh out the performance.
The Method can also often be used to give license to actors bad behavior — or rather, an excuse to be a jerk because their character is a jerk. "James Franco is a Method actor," Tyrese Gibson told Casting Frontier. "Whenever we'd have to get in the ring for boxing scenes, and even during practice, the dude was full-on hitting me." Jared Leto, another Method actor, famously sent his "Suicide Squad" coworkers gifts like dead pigs. "That was a good gift because it had the effect of unifying us as a group because then it became us against him," Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje told E!.
Meryl went Method to play the ice queen Priestly, and found the experience so lonely that she vowed to never do it again. "It was horrible! I was [miserable] in my trailer," Steep said in the oral history with EW. "I could hear them all rocking and laughing. I was so depressed! I said, 'Well, it's the price you pay for being [the] boss!' That's the last time I ever attempted a Method thing!" Clearly, the Method works for some actors, but not Meryl Streep — and she's enough of a powerhouse to perform without any special "methods" at all.