The Rory McIlroy Cameo Says a Lot About 'The Devil Wears Prada 2'

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The Devil Wears Nada

Look, I know what you’re all thinking. And the answer is yes, The Devil Wears Prada 2 does have a Rory McIlroy cameo.

I don’t want to harp too much on Happy Gilmore 2’s worst celebrity actor showing up in a movie about the fashion industry — despite being famous for a sport in which every player wears the same ball-cap-and-slacks outfit even though uniforms aren’t required — but it does say something about the general spirit of this thing. What was the thinking here? Who is it for? Putting the back-to-back Masters champion in a sequel to the thinking woman’s Sex and the City isn’t even relevant enough to count as fan service. And that’s to say nothing of the equally apropos-of-nothing cameo by tech gadfly Kara Swisher, which made me want to throw my soda at the screen. If you don’t know who Kara Swisher is, just look at her book cover, which is as efficient at communicating her whole deal as the Ricky Gervais’ crucifix photoshoot.

What’s that famous Coco Chanel quote we’re always reusing? The one about removing one accessory before leaving the house? The Devil Wears Prada 2 is the precise opposite of that, the plot equivalent of swimming through a quarter mile of gewgaws and baubles on the way to the door. The script, by Aline Brosh McKenna (both she and original director David Frankel returned for this 20-years-later sequel) takes the Johnny Depp’s-personal-style approach to plotting. Was the original this scattershot and manic? I don’t remember it that way, but they do say memory is a capricious twat.

The bigger surprise here, I suppose, is that, to The 2evil Wears Prada’s minor credit, it does feel like there was something here that the manic plotting is covering up. The original was adapted from Lauren Weisberger’s thinly-veiled roman-a-clef about working as Anna Wintour’s assistant at Vogue, with Wintour played memorably by Dame Meryl Streep (very generous to the real Wintour, it seems, though I admit I know little about Anna Wintour beyond the sunglasses and stupid bob. My toxic trait is that I don’t trust anyone whose bangs are part of their persona, it’s like they’re always hiding something). Where Streep is basically synonymous with winning Oscars, virtually the entire cast of the original Devil Wears Prada — Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, Stanley Tucci — have become Oscar nominees in the intervening years (or winners, in Hathaway’s case).

That feels like excuse enough for a sequel. I can understand the line of thinking where just putting these actors together would automatically create something interesting. But it didn’t dawn on me until the first scene, which sees now-serious-journalist Andy Sachs (Hathaway) winning a journalism award seconds after her entire newsroom gets fired via text message, that I was basically watching a movie about my own industry. I’m not sure that was a good thing — I didn’t go into a movie called “The Devil Wears Prada” expecting to have flashbacks to my own getting-laid-off experiences — but clearly there was some meat here.

The book on which the original film was based was something of light takedown of Manhattan elitism and the fashion and media industries (a burn book, you might say, perhaps that was the Kara Swisher connection). The first act of the sequel telegraphs that it might go the same direction. Miranda Priestly (Streep/Wintour), still the editor-in-chief of Runway Magazine, has become embroiled in scandal, thanks to publishing a glowing profile of an upstart brand that turns out to have been built on sweatshop labor (the brand is never named, but let’s call it “Schmein”). The timing couldn’t be worse, as Runway’s parent company’s cigar chomping owner, Irv Ravitz (Tibor Feldman) was just about to name Miranda the global chief content officer of all of his brands (as Wintour was made, of Condé Nast in 2020).

When Andy Sachs goes viral for her angry acceptance speech (“doesn’t anyone care about fucking journalism anymore?!?”), Ravitz decides to bring her on as Runway’s new features editor to try to shore up the magazine’s reputation, much to the chagrin of her old persecutor Miranda Priestly. (Sidenote: If I never see another plotline about a character “going viral” and subsequent shitty meme montage, I will die a happy man). Priestly, of course, doesn’t remember Andy (“she was one of the Emilys,” says her chief toady/lead photographer, Nigel Kipling, played by Tucci) and continues treating her terribly. Andy — who doesn’t really read “plucky underdog” when she’s being played by human Disney princess Anne Hathaway — takes the opportunity to do “real journalism” (cue another headline montage), but Miranda points out that none of it is really moving the needle, readership-wise.

Andy is forced instead to go after an interview with Miranda’s white whale, the chic ex-wife of a tech billionaire who hasn’t done press in three years, played by Lucy Liu. I don’t remember her character’s name, but let’s call her Schmackenzie Scott Schmezos. This plotline, in and of itself, is a devastatingly accurate critique of the magazine industry, in which doing interesting work will always matter far less than your level of access to some rich asshole. There are times that the movie even seems aware of this.

One of the conundrums for this sequel is that the class of people the original was designed to skewer — legacy magazine titans like Anna Wintour, David Remnick, Graydon Carter, all the kinds of people with whom Donald Trump has had queeny blood feuds since the 80s — aren’t really the “Big Bads” of the media industry anymore. Now that honor goes to drug-addled neuroatypical tech lordlings like Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, et al. My generation of media serfs loved to hate the Wintour/Carter crowd, but it was largely out of the simple jealousy of them being ensconced in an industry when it was still so powerful. They had expense accounts and got paid by the word, where we had to churn out shitty SEO and start newsletters. They were stultifyingly pompous, but at least they didn’t believe they could replace us with fancy autocorrect. There’s nothing like a Sam Altman to make you nostalgic for a Jann Wenner.