Is it Jeff Bezos? How Devil Wears Prada 2 created its tech bro villains
Aline Brosh McKenna wrote the screenplay for The Devil Wears Prada 2. She talks to Adam Bloodworth about writing the ultimate corporate rom-com
The Devil Wears Prada 2’s screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna vividly recalls her first impression of hard work.
When she was young, she remembers her engineer father crawling around on the floor to adjust complicated circuitboards, hoping each obsessive tweak would lead to his next breakthrough invention.
“He had a real love for work,” says McKenna. “It’s a tribute to my dad that he didn’t moderate his message for a daughter differently than a son.”
Her upbringing instilled in her a natural aptitude for work, but also for writing about the idea of it. Morning Glory and I Don’t Know How She Does It are two of the screenwriter’s corporate-themed films, and she says she has always found the idea of writing about the workplace fascinating.
“There’s a certain kind of intimacy you don’t get anywhere else,” she says, “but there are also boundaries you don’t have in your personal relationships.”
Rather than the one her father tinkered with, it was the circuit board of New York City that became McKenna’s obsession when in 2006 she wrote the screenplay for Lauren Weisberger’s novel The Devil Wears Prada.
Devil Wears Prada 2 writer: tech bros are a lot of odd folks
Twenty years later, her Devil Wears Prada 2 script has reintroduced the beloved characters into an era anew.
This newspaper was one of dozens to give the movie a four-star review, and that is in no small part due to McKenna’s script, which follows magazine editor Miranda Priestly and her beleagueured assistant-cum-journalist Andy Sachs struggling in a new era of AI interference and a failing print magazine industry.
Of course, there are Meryl Streep’s pithy one-liners, but The Devil Wears Prada 2 also presents a realistic picture of where Miranda Priestly, Sachs, frenemy Emily Charlton, and the whole gang, might be today.
It isn’t the frocks or the romance subplots that linger in the mind, though, but the theme of the workplace. How work defines us but also how we are being let down by it. There is a line at the end of the movie where Meryl Streep – compelling as ever – delivers a sort of homage to corporate life.
“I just love working,” she says. “Don’t you?” Amid justifiable grumbles about cost of living crises and a lack of jobs pervading nearly every sector, it is perversely refreshing to hear a corporate rallying call. All the while, the tensions between ambition, opportunity and purposeful journalism versus a drive for clicks remain.
‘There’s the feeling that work brings joy’
“Young people are being told that it’s an incredibly Darwiniann world,” says Brosh McKenna. “If you can’t justify work in very specific metrics – dollars, cents, clicks, engagements – then it’s not worth doing.”
Academy Award-winning Meryl Streep worked with Brosh McKenna to sculpt her killer lines. Some of them were ad-libbed, including that memorable monologue about loving to work no matter the cost.
“I think Meryl said ‘I love my job’ the first time, then she changed it to ‘I love to work,’” she remembers of how the line came together. “I walked over and was like: ‘that’s great.’ it just was so perfect. There’s this core feeling that work brings joy that I think pervades the whole movie and is sort of encapsulated by that line.”
For the sequel, Brosh McKenna was tasked with writing two villainous tech bro characters. Justin Theroux plays Benji Barnes, an entrepreneur who hopes to fire journalists and replace them with AI, and B.J. Novak takes on nepo baby Jay Ravitz, heir of the publishing firm that employs Priestly and Sachs.
Both men have an unnerving slickness that challenges Miranda in the pantomime villain stakes. There were rumours that Barnes was inspired by Jeff Bezos, who had pitched to buy American Vogue and who also bankrolled this year’s Met Gala, Vogue’s annual fashion event that is mirrored in The Devil Wears Prada, but Brosh McKenna denies this.
Deleted Devil Wears Prada 2 scenes
“I always wonder if that rumour [Bezos buying US Vogue] happened because people knew what was in the script,” says Brosh McKenna. “That was a rumour that happened while we were making the movie and we were like, ‘okay, maybe we’re onto something…Wow, we kinda guessed right.’”
After all, you don’t need to be inspired by one individual when there are thousands of hilarious tech bros, she asserts. “People who work in tech, not to paint them all with a single brush, there’s really a lot of odd folks. That’s what I wanted to capture more than anything else.”
When it comes to Barnes, you wouldn’t trust him as far as you could throw him – but that oily quality is what makes him so compelling. “There’s something odd about Benji,” says Brosh McKenna. “An odd, nihilistic, uncanny quality.”
Filming took approximately four months and Brosh Mckenna, who also executive produced, was present for most of the shoot. I wonder if it’s especially hard making cuts when you wear both writer and executive producer hats.
But Brosh McKenna, who has written more than a dozen film and TV screenplays, says her job is to become “very unsentimental” when it comes to “tossing things out,” even when they could have taken days or weeks to film.
‘Do I know what happens to Miranda? Of course!’
A storyline following Andy Sachs fangirling in Milan is one of the scenes that didn’t make the cut of The Devil Wears Prada 2. “There’s a funny moment when they get to Milan where Andy starts talking about the history of Milan,” says Brosh McKenna. “It was extremely funny. It was her being boring in a know-it-all way, which just really made me laugh. But we didn’t need it.”
The success of the sequel makes a third visit to the Runway office feel inevitable – “if the stars align, that would be great,” she says – but does Andy finally get the big job? Will Miranda Priestly finally retire?
“Oh come on!” says Brosh McKenna, who is wearing aviators and a sweater while zooming in from a Los Angeles cafe. “I’m not gonna tell you a single thing.” Does that mean she has the fate of the characters mapped out in her mind? “Of course I do. But I’m not gonna tell you anything.”
Needless to say, the viral success of this spring’s release has sent Brosh McKenna as giddy as an intern on their first day in the Runway office. “You know that emoji where the top of the head explodes?” she says. “That’s how I feel.”
The Devil Wears Prada 2 with Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway is in cinemas now