The Devil Wears Prada’s real-life Emily has finally been identified as Anna Wintour’s first assistant
Topics: TV And Film, Fashion, Entertainment, Celebrity
Jen Thomas
Featured Image Credit: 20th Century Studios
Topics: TV And Film, Fashion, Entertainment, Celebrity
As the Devil Wear Prada 2 hits our screens, the identity of Emily Blunt's character has been revealed.
The beleaguered first assistant to Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestley, the real life Emily has been identified as Leslie Fremar.
Fremar worked as Anna Wintour's first assistant at Vogue, alongside Lauren Weisberger was her junior.
Weisberger went on to pen the 2003 novel The Devil Wears Prada, basing Anne Hathaway's character Andy Sachs on herself.
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The author said the book was 'loosely' based on her experiences working at the high fashion magazine, but the identity of Emily had remained hidden until now.
According to Pop Culture, Fremar said the much-feared editor Wintour found the book and asked, “Who is Lauren Weisberger? She wrote a book about us.”
Variety reports that Fremar said the book 'felt like a betrayal' and said that she 'never talked again' to Weisberger after she left.
Fremar did say that she managed to speak to Emily Blunt though about the role, but didn't get quite the response she was hoping for.
"I said to her, I was like, 'I need you to know, I'm Emily,' she was not that interested to be honest. I thought I was gonna get this huge reaction."
"Like no, it was like 'oh, ok'" she confessed. Awkward.
Fremar says she and Weisberger worked side-by-side for eight months, just like in the book and the film.
She also credits herself with some of the most iconic lines.
She told People: “I definitely told [Lauren] a million girls would kill for the job. That was definitely my line because I actually really believed that, and I knew that she didn’t necessarily wanna be there.”
When Wintour heard about the book, she said she was 'petrified', when the editor 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,"
She continued: “I wanted to, like, ask more questions, but you can’t really ask her that many questions.”
Fremar admits she probably wasn't the nicest to work with, but still thinks it was unfair.
“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… 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.”
Fremar also told Vogue that the strict rules were true: "There were rules passed down to me: I couldn’t eat at my desk. You couldn’t even go to the bathroom, because one of the assistants always had to be there."
As to whether she would talk to Weisberger now after all this time and since Fremar has found huge success as a Hollywood stylist, she said: “There’s nothing to be said.”