The real-life “Emily” that inspired Emily Blunt’s character in The Devil Wears Prada is coming forward.
Speaking with Vogue‘s The Run-Through, celebrity stylist Leslie Fremar revealed that she’s the inspiration for “Emily,” the assistant to Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly in the film and colleague to Anne Hathaway’s Andy Sachs.
Lauren Weisberger released the bestselling novel the first film is adapted from more than two decades ago after serving as a junior assistant for Anna Wintour, the inspiration behind Streep’s Miranda Priestly, and fictionalized her time working for Wintour and Vogue. Fremar hired Weisberger and worked with her for eight months.
“I definitely told her a million girls would kill for the job,” Fremar revealed, referencing a memorable quote from the film. “That was definitely my line because I actually really believed that, and I knew that she didn’t necessarily wanna be there.”
Despite being the inspiration for the Emily character in the book, Fremar said she didn’t learn about the release of it until after she’d already left her job working for Wintour and Vogue.
“I got a call from Anna’s office saying that she wanted to see me,” Fremar recalled. “I was petrified. [Wintour] said, ‘Who’s Lauren Weisberger?’ And I said, ‘She was your junior assistant.’ And she’s like, ‘Well, she wrote a book about us, and you’re worse than me.’”
Fremar also said she wanted to “ask more questions” but noted “you can’t really ask her that many questions.”
The early copy of the book was “quite mean” at first but eventually “softened,” according to Fremar. “It just felt like this exposure. 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.”
When looking back at her time working with Weisberger, who she says “didn’t really socialize with anyone else,” Fremar shared, “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.”
The two “never talked again” after Weisberger left Vogue, and should they reunite now, Fremar says it would be “very awkward.”
As for Blunt, Fremar said she did connect with the actress and told her she was the inspiration for the character. “She was not that interested, to be honest. I thought I was gonna get this, like, huge reaction. Like, no. It was like, ‘Oh, OK.’”
