The Devil Wears Pradaville

Last week, crowds gathered along the sidewalks in Soho to watch a tall brunette jog across the street. She started outside the MoMA Store, dodged a cab, crossed southwest past a hot-dog cart and the Glossier store, and landed at 72 Spring, where she threw open a door. It’s all there in clips posted on Instagram: Workers leaned out of windows for a view. Diners at Balthazar craned their heads over the crowds. Tourists huddled outside the Chipotle.

The spectacle was a behind-the-scenes glimpse of The Devil Wears Prada 2, and the brunette was Andy Sachs two decades later, played by Anne Hathaway, of course. The sequel has been shooting on location in New York for almost a month, and the sets have been anything but a secret. Fans and gawkers have been sharing tips on how to find filming locations and posting videos that reveal casting decisions and wardrobe choices. It’s a mini-industry that rivals the paparazzi, but typically movie sets are more locked down and the action is kept out of sight. “Usually, for a regular person, there’s no way to get anywhere near,” says Mickey Blank, a content creator who got her start posting the vintage cars parked for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and keeps her feed going following tips from blabby PR and production insiders. But standing mere feet from the action and the rolling cameras? “This is unheard of,” Blank says.

The open sets are turning the city into a Devil Wears Prada 2 backdrop, in which watching the strangers watching the scene becomes part of the spectacle. Over the last week of July, the crew filmed at the McGraw-Hill Building, at 1221 Sixth Avenue, where a scene or two was filmed in what looks like a conference room with windows on two sides over the schmoozy Oceana Grill. From Sixth Avenue, passersby could catch Streep blowing kisses at the glass and mouthing I love you to them like a Hollywood Evita. The second-floor office was so easy to peer into that onlookers could also see Hathaway, Stanley Tucci, their cafeteria trays laid with fake meals, and the LED screens behind them with covers of a made-up design magazine. 

Other shoots have been just as out in the open. A Times writer reported stumbling onto the set of a faux Met Gala in July while walking her dog. For that shoot, Streep was outside the extremely public American Museum of Natural History in a red gown so oversize and bright that it was visible across 77th Street. In Brooklyn, fans got shots of Hathaway twirling in a blue dress outside the Long Island Bar on Atlantic Avenue — one of the neighborhood’s busiest corners, especially in summer, when it can feel like the entire borough is heading to the splash pad and picnic spots at Brooklyn Bridge Park. Couldn’t they have locked down a quieter side street? Maybe in Cobble Hill or sleepy North Greenpoint?

The scene outside the bar showed Hathaway with her apparent love interest (Patrick Brammall), one of the spoilers from the videos that fans have complained about. But we already know enough from Variety about the film’s major plotline: Miranda Priestly (Streep) is fighting for her career “amid the decline of traditional magazine publishing” (gulp) and has a new foe: her former assistant Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), who’s become “a high-powered executive for a luxury group, with advertising dollars that Priestly desperately needs.” That might explain one set that’s further afield — an $8.33 million mansion on a peninsula on Oyster Bay with a pool, tennis court, waterfront views, and a curvy driveway — an ideal weekend retreat for Charlton, now armed with C-suite money. (That shoot was this week, before an appearance at 73rd and Lexington.)

A listing shot shows a curvy driveway and pool at an Oyster Bay retreat that screams wealth, playing into the conflict between outsiders like Andy Sachs (Hathaway) and insiders like Miranda Priestly (Streep).
Photo: Sotheby’s International Realty

Fans might have a harder time glimpsing what happens up that Long Island driveway. But so would Andy Sachs — a character who, in the first movie, was an everywoman both awed by wealth and put off by it, an outsider who briefly immerses herself in another world and then chooses to return to her own. Sort of like the fans who came out to watch Hathaway jog in SoHo last week, then waited to see what was next. At the end of the day, Hathaway emerged from 72 Spring and got into a black car at the corner of Lafayette. She was still in full costume, and it wasn’t clear whether she was getting into the car as a movie star or as her character, whisked away on business. Could this just be brilliant public relations, blurring the line between reality and film? Blank, the content creator, had another theory. “I think they gave up,” she said. “Everyone has a phone. You can’t avoid it.”