The sequel to The Devil Wears Prada, which swans into theaters this weekend, has me reflecting on an important question: Is our society more or less shallow now than it was in 2006? The easy answer is that we are much improved. We can look back on all the body-shaming and tabloid toxicity of the past and make documentaries and write op-eds that call it what it was. We can be comfortable in our certainty that the first Devil Wears Prada’s recurring joke about its star Anne Hathaway being an unfashionable Size 6 would never fly today. The new movie itself makes hay of how much the thinking around bodies has shifted: An assistant is tasked with editing the most offensive language of Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly in real time so as to keep her out of human resources’ crosshairs. But I’m not convinced we’ve evolved as much as we’d like to think. I know this because the moment I laid eyes on Patrick Brammall, Hathaway’s love interest in DWP2, I thought to myself, Oh, the internet is not going to be happy about this.
Brammall, an Australian actor best known for a well-liked but little-seen television rom-com called Colin From Accounts, plays a contractor named Peter in the movie. Hathaway’s Andy meets him when a friend drags her to look at apartments, arguing that she is too successful to continue occupying the hovel she’s living in at the start of the movie. (It’s not actually a hovel; it looks perfectly nice and would probably rent for at least $3,500 in real life. Its only flaw is that the water comes out brown. Hello, it’s called a Brita filter.) When Andy encounters Peter in the model apartment, she says some slightly disparaging things about what she does not realize is his chosen profession of gutting old buildings. He doesn’t mind, though. When Patrick arrives to their first date having boned up on her journalism work, she’s impressed, because none of her other boyfriends ever bothered. He’s sweet, but the bar is on the floor.
I want to be very clear that Brammall is not bad-looking. Does anyone have a megaphone I can say that into? HE’S DECENTLY HANDSOME, OK? He has a bit of Ewan McGregor–meets–The Pitt’s Dr. Abbott about him, and with the accent to boot, he’s a catch. It’s just that Anne Hathaway is a goddess. She always has been, but after enduring a few years of her career where everyone decided to hate her for no reason—something we seem to require of all female celebrities now; see why I am reluctant to accept that things are so much better these days?—she is currently enjoying something of a resurgence. It’s like the spell wore off and everyone remembered how great she is. We all love whatever she did to her face, which she insists was not a facelift but a trick her stylists do with braids.
Unfortunately, one of the most popular modes of celebrating a favorite star lately seems to involve insisting that the men surrounding them are unworthy. Maybe I just have permanent brain damage from living through the online conversation about Materialists last year, but it truly surprises me how acceptable it’s become to call men broke or ugly and how praising someone’s looks has become synonymous with praising their virtue. It’s this kind of stuff: Anne Hathaway deserves her success because her facecard is lethal. (If you don’t like the term facecard, you’ll be horrified to hear that I’m now also seeing people talk about their fave celebrities’ bodycards.) Megan Thee Stallion never should have dated Klay Thompson because he is ugly. Margaret Qualley is beauty personified and Jack Antonoff is a worm. So it’s not that I have a problem with Brammall’s looks, though I can plainly see he is not a model, but I am familiar enough with this worldview that I’m currently girding my loins for all the discussions people are about to have about how Peter “wasn’t good enough” or, worse, “wasn’t hot enough” for Andy.
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I am confident in this partly because it’s one of people’s favorite things to debate about the original movie. Fans will recall that Andy’s boyfriend in the 2006 film was a chef named Nate played by Adrian Grenier. In 2006, Grenier was the star of HBO’s Entourage and a hot young thing on par with Hathaway, but their careers since veered in different directions; hers to the A-list, and his, well, not. (Grenier has expressed disappointment that he wasn’t asked to be in the sequel.) Declaring that, actually, Nate was the real villain of The Devil Wears Prada has become a “Die Hard is actually a Christmas movie”–like cliché online in the years since the movie was released. This is a little unfair insomuch as it seems like a way of dumping on Grenier for not having quite as brilliant a trajectory as his co-star. It also misses the point that, as the A.V. Club once argued, one of the geniuses of the 2006 film’s script, which was written by Aline Brosh McKenna (who returned to write the sequel), is that it “purposefully relegates [the love interests] to the kind of thinly written, thankless roles that women usually have to play in big studio comedies.”
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In her review for Slate, Dana Stevens wrote that Patrick’s “half-baked character adds very little to our understanding of Andy or her world” and that she would have preferred Andy not have a romantic subplot at all in the sequel. She makes a good point. Personally, I liked the subtle way the movie presented the developments in Miranda’s love life. At the end of the first movie, we learn she is getting divorced from a husband we don’t know all that much about but understand to be fed up with her devotion to her work. There is no mention of him in the second movie; now, Miranda is with a supportive violinist played by Kenneth Branagh, an actor almost as decorated as Streep herself whose casting underscores that she’s finally found an equal.
With Patrick, I don’t see the intention quite so clearly. The sequel had its pick of actors, and I do wonder why they didn’t tap a Theo James or some other devastatingly handsome actor to be Andy’s love interest—given the ample references to the first movie and a certain musical number, they weren’t opposed to a little fan service. We would all do well to ponder whether the filmmakers included Patrick as a subversive statement about decentering the importance of men and relationships or just, like, a cute Australian guy. Sadly, I fear we are doomed instead to spend the weekend dissecting his looks with incel-like precision and declaring him mid. It doesn’t have to be this way. Give it another 20 years—maybe by the time the third movie comes out we won’t be so superficial.
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