The real-life inspiration behind Emily Blunt’s sarcastic and workaholic character in The Devil Wears Prada and its upcoming sequel is coming forward to identify herself for the first time — though she’s already used to the spotlight.
Known throughout Hollywood for her star-studded clientele, celebrity stylist Leslie Fremar confirmed that she inspired the antagonistic senior assistant to Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly in the movie during an interview Tuesday on Vogue’s The Run-Through podcast ahead of The Devil Wears Prada 2 premiere.
“I know I am. I am Emily,” former Vogue employee Fremar told the fashion magazine’s new editor-in-chief Chloe Malle, who has taken over for Anna Wintour.
Since her Vogue days as Wintour’s first assistant, Fremar has built a high-profile career for herself working with clients like Julianne Moore, Charlize Theron and Demi Moore. In 2022, she worked as Nicola Peltz’s bridal stylist and helped her secure the custom Valentino gown that sparked debates for months after her wedding to Brooklyn Beckham, with Fremar telling Vogue it was the most beautiful dress she had ever seen.
The Devil Wears Prada was adapted from Lauren Weisberger’s bestselling 2003 novel of the same name about a toxic work environment, which was based on her experience working as a junior assistant at Vogue for eight months. Vogue inspired the film’s fictional Runway magazine.
In the film, Blunt’s Emily Charlton is cold and passive-aggressive to Anne Hathaway’s character, Andy Sachs, who represents Weisberger. At one point, Charlton serves her the iconic line: “A million girls would kill for this job.”
“I definitely told her a million girls would kill for the job,” Fremar confirmed to Malle. “That was definitely my line, because I actually really believed that, and I knew that she didn’t necessarily want to be there.”
She continued: “Even though someone obviously advised her to make it fiction, it was really based off of a lot of things that, you know, I lived, she lived.”
Fremar described Weisberger as uninterested in fashion, adding: “I probably was not very nice, and I probably was high-strung because I felt like I was having to do her job as well. So for me, that was really frustrating. I think she was probably just sitting there writing a book and not necessarily taking the job as seriously as I did.”
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She told Malle that the book “felt like a betrayal” when it first came out, and that she never talked to Weisberger again after she left Vogue.
Weisberger, for her part, has not returned requests for comment about Fremar’s remarks, but penned a Vogue article published Tuesday about her life after the novel.
“It wasn’t an attempt to take anyone down or exact some sort of revenge,” Weisberger wrote. “I was just writing something that felt true to my experience as an assistant in very close proximity to a powerful woman—one who filled me with abject terror—before I had the distance or the maturity or the sense of self-preservation to round off the edges.”
The Devil Wears Prada 2 hits theaters May 1.
