With good reason, The Devil Wears Prada is on the brain today—after all, its three stars Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, and Emily Blunt just reunited last night onstage at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, 18 years after the film premiered in 2006.
It’s hard to imagine anyone other than Hathaway embodying the role of Andrea “Andy” Sachs, who somehow (somewhat inexplicably) finds herself working as an assistant to Miranda Priestly, the editor-in-chief of the fictional Runway magazine (who is played brilliantly by Streep). (Spoiler alert: when it comes to fashion, Andy’s interests lie elsewhere.) Blunt, for her part, plays Priestly’s more senior assistant, Emily Charlton.
Though Hathaway is Andy and Andy is Hathaway, there were apparently seven (!) other actresses in consideration to play the part—and one of them even turned the coveted role down three times. In fact, Hathaway said on an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2021, she was actually the ninth choice to play the part, unbelievably.
Reportedly in consideration for the hit film’s starring role were Kate Hudson, Kirsten Dunst, Natalie Portman, Claire Danes, Scarlett Johansson, and Juliette Lewis—a stacked roster if there ever was one. But none was more heavily courted than Rachel McAdams, who was coming off of the successes of 2004’s Mean Girls and The Notebook and 2005’s Wedding Crashers.
Just Jared writes that McAdams “was heavily pursued for the starring role in the movie”; the film’s director David Frankel told Entertainment Weekly that “We offered it to Rachel McAdams three times. The studio was determined to have her, and she was determined not to do it.”
McAdams herself reflected on passing on the role of Andy (and several others) in an interview last year with Bustle: “I felt guilty for not capitalizing on the opportunity that I was being given, because I knew I was in such a lucky spot,” she said. “But I also knew it wasn’t quite jiving with my personality and what I needed to stay sane.”
She continued “There were definitely some anxious moments of wondering if I was just throwing it all away, and why was I doing that? It’s taken years to understand what I intuitively was doing.”
Everything tends to work out exactly as it should, and personally, there’s no one for Andy in our eyes but Hathaway, who, after the success of the film, went on to star in Bride Wars, Valentine’s Day, Love & Other Drugs, Les Misérables, and Interstellar, among other films.
