Miranda Priestly Ignited Meryl Streep’s Populist Era, ‘Devil Wears Prada 2’ Shows She’s Still a Crowd-Pleaser

Earlier this week, in one of her umpteen promotional interviews for “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” Meryl Streep deviated from the tried-and-true PR playbook to actually say something interesting. Asked on U.K. radio whether she felt she had softened the deliciously venomous character of Miranda Priestly for the sequel, she made a case for a “messier” approach to characterization: “I think when we tend to Marvel-ize the movies now — we got the villains and we got the good guys — and it’s so boring.”

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She’s right, of course, though it perhaps takes a star of Streep’s unassailable status and seniority to casually dismiss the Marvel machine while in the same breath promoting the film that is kicking off Walt Disney Studios’ summer slate. Now in her mid-70s, with nothing left to prove in a career that has spanned six decades, Streep answers to no studio. “The Devil Wears Prada 2” certainly needed her more than she needed it, and that off-the-cuff remark is a clear indication of where she sees herself in the system: outside of it, specifically, but willing to lend it her artistry when the mood takes her. Priestly, after all, was no Disney villain when the then-unowned 20th Century Fox put out “The Devil Wears Prada” in 2006; even for legacy-sequel purposes, the character belongs to her more than it does to any current corporate overlords.

Not counting voice work, “The Devil Wears Prada 2” is Streep’s first feature film appearance since she played an amusingly glassy, incompetent POTUS in Adam McKay’s manic ensemble comedy “Don’t Look Up” in 2021, and her first outright starring vehicle since the lockdown-era double of Ryan Murphy’s “The Prom” and Steven Soderbergh’s “Let Them All Talk” the year before. All three of those were streaming releases, which makes “The Devil Wears Prada 2” feel all the more like a comeback — or a return, at least, to multiplex queendom. (You’d have to go back to Steven Spielberg’s “The Post,” in 2017, to find a Streep leading turn seen widely in theaters.)

Streep isn’t exactly breaking a sweat in the movie. As in the first, she makes a virtue of dry, icy underplaying, while repeating many of the gestures and inflections that tickled us the first time round, this time to incrementally warmer effect. (Priestly was a pure antagonist the first time round; now the script has us rooting for her triumph.) But she’s still its best reason for being: Her serenely implacable star aura carries the film through its more indifferent patches, while there’s more tension in her taut line readings than there is in its glum death-of-old-media narrative. Likable as ever, Anne Hathaway’s plucky journo Andy Sachs is the film’s nominal heroine, but it’s not her every word that “The Devil Wears Prada 2” hangs on.

This particular kind of force-field grandstanding was a surprise from Streep in 2006 — even if she’d already by then established her aptitude for broad, camp-streaked comedy in the likes of “She-Devil” and “Death Becomes Her.” By the turn of the century, Streep had worked hard to shed the dourly prestigious woman-of-a-thousand-accents reputation that followed her in the ’80s and ’90s, and begun to have some fun. As a spaced-out take on real-life author Susan Orlean in Spike Jonze’s “Adaptation,” she was looser and funkier than she’d allowed herself to be, well, ever on screen, while her ogre-ish, Hillary Clinton-inspired villain in Jonathan Demme’s “The Manchurian Candidate” remake was another bold swerve.

Still, for all her ample fame and acclaim, Streep’s name itself hadn’t been a popular marquee draw in a while. When she first attached herself to “The Devil Wears Prada,” it seemed she was slumming it a little: gifting a little class to a fluffy summer release in exchange for some box office points. Few anticipated that Miranda Priestly — arguably something of a supporting part on the page — would become not just a signature Streep role, but the foundation of a second or even third wave of movie stardom for her.

Yet as the film stuck around for months, both in theaters and in the general culture, it became clear that Streep’s cleverly chilled performance was the sticking factor, inspiring quotations and impressions and genuine, enduring fandom among younger audiences with little attachment to (or even memory of) her previous standard-bearing performances. Streep’s Oscar-winning performance as a trauma-burdened Holocaust survivor in “Sophie’s Choice” is wrenching, staggering, widely seen as a high-water mark in the history of screen performance — but you can’t make any memes from it, can you?

With “The Devil Wears Prada,” then, Streep cracked a new, evolving 21st-century model of screen-icon status, and suddenly found there was an audience — mostly female, not all of an age — willing to follow her to the multiplex whatever she made. Headlining the exuberantly silly ABBA musical “Mamma Mia!” in 2008 was the first clear demonstration of her post-“Prada” clout: She was evidently having a ball, and the masses danced in the aisles with her. That same year, her name helped make a midsize $50 million hit from “Doubt,” a stern Catholic chamber piece enlivened considerably by her ripe performance as a compromised Mother Superior.

A year later, she was fruitier still as Julia Child in “Julie & Julia,” and made Nora Ephron’s film a smash with the older demographic that only ventures to the cinema a couple of times a year, and the same went for her blithe rom-com turn opposite Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin in Nancy Meyers’ “It’s Complicated.” None of these performances had quite the subtlety or wit that she brought to “The Devil Wears Prada,” but they all collectively served to redesign the actress once seen by many as a cold, chameleonic technician as a great Hollywood entertainer — generously in touch with her audience, with a distinct force of personality bridging the characters’ different voices and faces.

That momentum was strong enough to make a global hit out of even the most unlikely vehicle: Phyllida Lloyd’s hopelessly muddled “The Iron Lady,” in which Streep played Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s most notoriously loathed Prime Minister, as equal parts high-camp harridan and underestimated girlboss. It’s one of her clumsiest performances, but her storming, unmodulated charisma just about held the film’s fragmented narrative and ideology together, pulled in $115 million worldwide, and won her a third Oscar to boot. There’s a wide tonal chasm between Streep’s Margaret Thatcher and Miranda Priestly, but both were products of the same rekindled popular touch.

Streep’s populist hot streak tailed off around that point. She was gently, endearingly human as a neglected wife opposite Tommy Lee Jones in “Hope Springs,” but the film, despite decent box office, quickly faded from the popular consciousness, and while her brash overplaying in “August: Osage County,” “Into the Woods” and “Florence Foster Jenkins” brought her the requisite Oscar nominations, few would return to those films as signature Streep vehicles. A reunion with Jonathan Demme in “Ricki and the Flash,” playing a washed-up rocker, was bracingly eccentric and against-type, but not embraced by her fandom; her sharp, stately turn in “The Post,” which netted her last Oscar nod to date, felt like a return to the sober, disciplined thespian of old.

Today, Streep can do whatever she wants — and what she’s wanted lately, it seems, is to work a bit less often, amusing herself with the odd grande-dame cameo, easy voice assignment or letting loose on the small screen in “Only Murders in the Building.” But her upcoming projects suggest a renewed commitment to serious screen acting: Cameron Crowe’s much-pondered Joni Mitchell biopic; the plum matriarch role in a long-awaited TV adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections”; a lead role opposite Sigourney Weaver in “Useful Idiots,” a corporate thriller from serious-minded auteur Joseph Cedar. It remains to be seen whether these roles will call on Streep’s most crowdpleasing instincts, but “The Devil Wears Prada 2” makes it clear that she’s not done playing.