In The Devil Wears Prada 2 , the Tables Turn

Is Emily Charlton indefensible? Emily Blunt isn’t so sure. The British actor has admittedly had a hard time justifying some of the choices made by her icy on-screen counterpart over the years. But according to Blunt, one thing Emily does deserve credit for is her impressive girlboss-y ability to get things done. “She’s a bloody hard worker,” Blunt says. “She has…an undying drive.”

Her elaborate outfits reflect as much. In 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada, we meet Emily as the overworked first assistant to Meryl Streep’s deliciously terrifying Miranda Priestly. Administering withering stares and eviscerating one-liners from her desk in the Runway office, Emily left a mark on pop culture as a career-first cool girl with a cutting sense of style. Sure, she made some questionable choices (we all remember the cube-of-cheese diet), but when her dreams of attending Paris Fashion Week were dashed, it felt like a cruel injustice.

Perhaps that’s why, twenty years later, Emily returns in The Devil Wears Prada 2 (in theatres May 1) with a supercharged sense of mean-girl fabulosity. Instead of an assistant who has to time her bathroom breaks accordingly, Emily is now a big-deal exec at Dior—giving her an ad-buying authority over Miranda and Runway. In this iteration, Emily’s bondage-inspired silhouettes and stark palette are dialled up for a villainous edge. She’s the same no-nonsense Emily she’s always been, only more powerful, thanks to years of cutthroat industry experience under her cinched belt.

To Blunt, Emily’s intensity is a manufactured performance. “I think Emily is deliberately trying to pull focus all the time,” she says. She points to a funeral scene in the sequel. It’s a morose event that tends to draw drab, demure dressing, but Emily wears a cut-out-filled minidress better suited for a club. “Some would deem that inappropriate, but it’s not for her.”

At the end of the day, Emily is a seasoned pro at dressing for the job. “She’ll do anything to appear iconic,” Blunt says. “Whether she is in her soul, whether she’s deemed that by others, is irrelevant. She’s going to dress the part.” This trait, though controversial, is exactly what makes Emily an enduring fan-favourite.

After all, everyone who works in fashion is playing some sort of part. Take Nigel, Miranda’s longtime right-hand man, portrayed with even-keeled suavity by Stanley Tucci. Whether he’s poring over photoshoot stills or berating Andy for eating clam chowder, Nigel never wavers from looking positively dapper. He swears by three-piece suits and pocket squares, and in the sequel, his aesthetic takes an even more flamboyant turn with clashing prints and maximalist colour stories. Tucci says this speaks to Nigel’s always-steady attitude—even when he’s looked over.

“I think he wants to carry on the tradition of classic men’s style,” Tucci says. “But it’s updated by the textures and the patterns that he puts together.” As his formal suiting suggests, Nigel plays by the rules at work, famously not confronting Miranda after she betrays his trust in the original film. Some might think Nigel is a pushover, but to Tucci, his unflappability is part of his charm. “Nigel doesn’t take offence, that he just grins and bears it,” Tucci reflects. “People often question why, but that’s just the way he is.”

Both stars say the styling process with costume designer Molly Rogers was very collaborative. “The fittings were extensive,” Tucci says. “When we would walk in there, Molly would have a selection of what she was leaning towards,” Blunt continues. “But then how we concocted it all together was such a beautiful dance.” For Blunt’s part, it involved a lot of archival Dior and statement pieces to match Emily’s look-at-me energy. “You can have a lot of theatre with this character, so the bolder—and the wilder—the better.”

For The Devil Wears Prada 2, the vision for Emily was decidedly darker and almost otherworldly. “When Molly was creating all of my looks—with a colour palette of greens, grays, browns and blacks—she told me, ‘I feel like Emily’s my little swamp monster,’” Blunt laughs. “That’s kind of what I was!”

Even though she is no longer an assistant, Emily’s severity emanates throughout the Runway office. This time, the character keeping this level of fright-inducing excellence alive is Amari, Miranda’s new first assistant, played by Simone Ashley. Like Emily before her, Amari has a sharp sense of style. But unlike her predecessor’s frantic anxiety, she maintains a dewy, put-together ease, always ready to solve scheduling snafus and subtly rein in Miranda’s political incorrectness. Her wardrobe is perhaps the best in the entire film—swathed in Jean Paul Gaultier archival pulls and Thom Browne suiting.

“We had this backstory that Amari was this kind of mysterious It Girl in the office,” Ashley says. “Everyone aspires to look and be like her, but no one really knows about her life in the city outside of Runway.” Unlike Emily, she’s not big on hoity-toity jabs, but her quiet authority over office underlings comes through nonetheless. “She has that flick of the wrist kind of sassiness,” Ashley says.

Through it all, The Devil Wears Prada 2 continues to explore the politics of wanting power—and what happens when you get it. Emily Charlton, though hard to defend at times, is admirably at ease being in charge.