Backstage with the Cameo Queens in The Devil Wears Prada 2
The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a welcome bonbon of magazine world wish fulfillment as that lost medium of peak publishing craters around us in a swirl of layoffs, mangy budgets, and sponsored content (or “sponcon” as it’s sometimes known, a term that, when I first heard it, I thought referred to a new form of pond life, and indeed it does). The funniest moment of media downward mobility in the film is the scene where Miranda Priestly, Meryl Streep’s peerless, haughty, Anna Wintour-inspired fashion sphinx, struggles and flails as she attempts to maneuver herself for the first time in her life next to an obese fellow passenger in an airline coach-class seat, on the way to the Milan couture collections.
You can see me as a teeny cameo in the film, milling around in a fancy lunch party scene at Miranda’s Oyster Bay estate. I was called last summer to join a buzz cluster of the likes of podcast queen Kara Swisher, politics scribe Molly Jong-Fast, New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino, musician and composer Jon Batiste and his Substacker wife Suleika Jaouad, Today show’s Jenna Bush Hager, and NBA giant Karl-Anthony Towns. We all va-voomed around with cast members Ken Branagh as Miranda’s screen husband, Tibor Feldman playing the unassuming Si Newhouse figure who owns Runway, Anne Hathaway—reprising her Andy Sachs/Priestley assistant role but all grown up and now supposedly a prize-winning reporter—wearing the colorful checkerboard dress Stanley Tucci’s Nigel has filched for her from the magazine’s fashion closet, and, of course, miraculous Meryl looking so airy and slight in a blue linen shirt over tight white jeans and Puma sneakers and that flippy, cropped, silver Miranda hair that I couldn’t believe was a wig. (She said it screws up into a tiny ball when she takes it off. All the volume comes from her own hair in the stocking underneath. A masterpiece of creative hairdressing.)
It was a boiling day, and the Devilmobile picked me up at 4 a.m. to drive to the glorious Gatsby house by the lake that had been commandeered for the shoot. Even though I grew up with a film-producer father, I am always stunned at what a vast, teeming enterprise a movie set is. The DWP2 base camp was like a forward operation for a U.S. military war game. Acres of car park filled with caravans and convoys and minions with swinging lanyards racing to and fro. Multiple emails with the movie’s costume honcho who preapproved my “look,” not the bank-busting pastel Stella McCartney pantsuit I anticipated but a floaty, goldy chiffon number from the back of my closet. The costume department supplied jewelry, some divine pewter bangles I tried to order until I found they were $2,500 each, some fat gold beads I tracked down afterwards, and a clutch bag with raffia stalactites hanging off. “Shall I use the shoulder strap?” I asked the costumier. “No, under the arm. It’s more bitch,” he said. Jenna Bush Hager showed up in a wonderful cream lace skirt that I ravenously ordered online the next day, but, on me, looked like a voluminous Victorian tablecloth.
At “Miranda’s estate” was a long picnic table set for a strenuously tasteful summer lunch of lobster with corn and baby potatoes, a feast that we cameos could only toy with because the scene was shot over and over again, starting at 9 a.m. and lasting well into a day that got hotter and hotter. I was squeezed between Suleika Jaouad, who is as empathetic and artistic and direct as her musician husband Jon was outlandish and otherworldly in his green tapestry suit. On my other side was Karl-Anthony Towns, whom, as a sports dunce, I had never heard of. We soon got into a conversation about player trading and how he could be on a plane to Florida and find out when he landed that he had been traded to the Lakers. I asked if he would have any say in the matter, and he said none. I was aghast and ready to be fired up about the appalling exploitation of athletes, until a sports lawyer friend asked if I knew how much Towns is paid (approximately $53 million, according to Google) and urged me not to make celebrity sports trades my next advocacy campaign. During one steamy break, I talked to Meryl about the agony of her Met Ball scene, where she was required to climb the museum’s exterior steps in a ballooning red taffeta gown and stilettos fifteen times between 9 p.m. and midnight, with crowds shouting “Mer–yl” at her, and she fell into a frothy fabric heap, generating a viral photo she had to pretend was hilarious. Let no one ever tell you that actors don’t work their asses off.
Meanwhile, as the afternoon wore on, we suddenly heard the chimes of a piano and rushed inside. Jon Batiste had discovered a baby grand in the library and was thundering away with a rousing concerto, his hands rapturously flying over the keys, his head thrown back, an entranced artist oblivious to anything but the music. We listened, mesmerized by this wonderful moment of random magic.
By 2 p.m., however, we cameo-istas were in a somewhat mutinous mood. The lobster and baby potatoes were looking ominously old. Between setups, we congregated downstairs in a room adjacent to the kitchen. There was no air conditioning in this period mansion, nor enough food for starving media mavens. The ever fearless Swisher led us in a call to order out, even though it was verboten by the house owners. A few wilting cameos gathered in the refrigerated wine cellar, as if hiding from an active shooter. Jenna Bush Hager shared that whenever Trump’s name comes up at dinner with her father, former president George W. Bush, he says, “Why spoil a good meal?” As if underlining the media world of the movie and the real media world today, Molly Jong-Fast kept checking her phone for the names of the three West Coast writers, plus her editor, who had just been fired by the new Vanity Fair editor, Mark Guiducci. Our silver-screen high point came at the end of a collapsed-hair afternoon when Meryl’s character walked Hathaway’s character around the cameo group to prove she was now seen as Runway’s rising star. I was told to murmur something about having noticed Andy/Anne’s viral piece in Runway and say archly, “I’ve been watching your byline, Andy.” There were so many failed attempts, it reminded me of when I had a CNBC TV show called Topic A and it took 20 takes to look straight into the camera and say with any semblance of conviction, “And THIS is Topic A.” I tell this to explain why I ended up in the film as a mute guest at Miranda Priestly’s tony lunch party. It was a nerve-flayed 8 p.m. by the time we wrapped.
Red Hot Carpet
All this artistic stress was forgotten in the buoyant mood at the DWP2 Lincoln Center premiere among prancing influencers, glossy magazine refugees, reunited cameos, and self-admiring content creators posing under the Runway logo. The levity was more than nostalgic anticipation of the film’s to-die-for montages of Streep and Hathaway entering and exiting in a succession of wildly unquiet luxury outfits at sky-high price points. What resonated was the message about the need to treasure the pursuit of unrelenting quality, not as a crumbling concept from the media’s Cretaceous period, but as a thrilling, collaborative, creative endeavour. “I do love work,” Miranda sighs to her now-confidante Andy Sachs. Are you listening, techno fascists, who keep telling us to be glad we can all pursue something called “hobbies” when AI steals our jobs? Oh, how the beaten-down media crowd at Lincoln Center loved hating the David Ellison-like heir of Runway’s deceased but still revered former owner. We cackled cathartically at the sneakered, tousle-haired bro’s toolish McKinsey-inspired “restructuring” ideas that will serve only to rip out the glamorous beating heart of both Runway and the aloof perfectionist at the magazine’s helm. Inevitably, the movie’s nepo boy can’t wait to unload the passé pile of glossy pages to a billionaire Bezos figure, portrayed as a laughing fool besotted with his clambering Lauren Sánchez-y girlfriend (played by returning Devil Wears Prada OG Emily Blunt)
The film has a volte-face that makes everyone cheer. But alas, not in life. On the first Monday in May, capping off a peak jubilee year for Condé queen Anna Wintour, the derided punch-line pair Bezos and Sánchez will co-host the real Met Ball. On the red carpet of DWP2’s New York premiere, it was left to Anne Hathaway to voice an earnest clarion call to restore the profession of journalism to its former glory. “I think it’s such an important layer of society that we have independent truth tellers,” she declared. An actress reflecting the sentiments of her fictional character may not be as uplifting as David Remnick orating at the next PEN gala about the importance of journalism but it was welcome, worthy, and a big win on Instagram.
Luscious report, Tina. We're thanking the heavens you went into journalism and not acting! How we miss the amazing heyday of magazines which you did so much to enliven! At least we have you now on Substack. Thanks for enlivening our world again.
Great summation, allowed me to see the event as if I was there. And when you wrote , no one realizes how hard actors work, you hit the nail on the head.