It’s difficult to believe now, but Emily Blunt was once asked to be more fashion-forward. Blunt was at 20th Century Fox Studios (now called 20th Century Studios) to audition for another movie when someone asked her if she’d audition for a film that the person described as “just this little thing with Meryl Streep.” Blunt was running late for a flight and felt “frantic and chaotic” as she read for the role of Miranda Priestly’s first assistant, who was also named Emily, for—you guessed it—2006’s The Devil Wears Prada. (Streep played the role of Priestly, a fashion magazine editor.) Blunt almost missed her flight and eventually got a callback from the movie’s director, David Frankel, asking her to come in for another audition. (Blunt said at an event called An Evening With…Emily Blunt—held Thursday night at The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in L.A.—that nobody knew who she was at the time of her The Devil Wears Prada audition.)
“He said, ‘Look, I would cast you, but the studio was wondering if you could wear something more stylish,’” Blunt told moderator Rob Marshall, per People. “To be fair, I was wearing a hoodie and jeans when I auditioned for it.”
In the movie, Blunt’s character Emily Charlton is constantly in a rush, trying to meet the demands of Priestly—and, obviously, being on trend is a must for her character. Blunt said she thought her hurried vibe trying to get to the airport might have worked to her advantage but said her outfit certainly did not. So, for her second audition for the movie in London, Blunt tried to step it up; she didn’t specifically describe the outfit she pulled together, but she did say “I thought I looked fairly chic. I don’t know. It probably was awful.” (The mid-aughts were cruel to us all.)
The next day, Blunt got the call that she got the part and cried upon hearing the news. “I mean the experience was, it was heaven, that movie was heaven,” she said of her time filming with Streep and costar Anne Hathaway. “We had a party. It was just—you can tell it was just exquisitely fun.” She added “It was the time of my life,” E! News reports.
Flash forward to the present day, and Blunt doesn’t have anyone telling her to come back with a more stylish look. Case in point? The outfit she wore to the career retrospective, where she wore a floral Philosophy di Lorenzo Serafini dress. The patterned dress featured an asymmetrical hemline, shoulder pad inserts, and gathered fabric at the waist, WWD reports.
Just as Blunt’s style sense has taken off from the mid-aughts, so has her career. Just this week, it was announced that Blunt had earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture for her role in Oppenheimer, which came out this summer.
