Meryl Streep famously played Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada ten years ago, and now she has admitted that she got to Fox to double their initial offer to do so.
According to Meryl, she knew the film and the character were sure to be a hit, and that the offer was “to my mind, slightly, if not insulting, not perhaps reflective of my actual value to the project. There was my ‘good-bye moment,’ and then they doubled the offer. I was 55, and I had just learned, at a very late date, how to deal on my own behalf.”
The film was based on Lauren Weisberger’s best-selling novel of the same name, and was a fun cautionary tale about losing your identity to your job told through the lense of the character Andy Sachs (played by Anne Hathaway) who had the most evil boss in the fashion industry.
The film only cost $41 million to make but ended up pulling in $326 million worldwide despite the fact that it opened against Superman Returns.
The film made a much bigger impact than anticipated, and it managed to introduce Emily Blunt to U.S. audiences as well as make Anne Hathaway a major star. She has said:
“I’m kind of the straight man, the observer. I’m proud of what I did. But amongst the showy roles, it’s the quiet one. I think what people saw was promising—it made people want to see more.”