She received huge worldwide acclaim following her portrayal of the assistant to Meryl’s character Miranda Priestly, who is the ruthless editor-in-chief of a high-end fashion magazine.
Emily previously revealed she didn’t anticipate just how successful the film would be prior to its release, and that her life “turned on a dime” as soon as it came out.
“One of the producers on set kept saying, ‘This is going to be big,’ but I had no idea it would hit in the way that it did,” she revealed in 2014.
“It was a movie that everybody loved and everybody saw, and so when that happens, your life — if you’ve previously been unknown — is going to change,” she added. “My life turned on a dime. I remember I used to go to this bakery in LA every day, and one day I went in, and everything had changed because the movie came out.”
Of course, in the film, Emily’s character repeatedly mocks Anne Hathaway’s Andy over her lack of fashion sense.
But it turns out that in real life, Emily didn’t actually have a clue about fashion herself.
Speaking with Variety this week, Emily admitted that prior to starring in the hit film, she “didn’t know enough in any way about the fashion industry.”
“I didn’t quite realize how intense it was,” she joked. “Friends of mine who’ve worked in the fashion industry say that that film does manage to capture that.”
“But I think it was a bit of a voyage of discovery for me in every way — not just about the industry itself but about style, and the art of it, and about how important it is,” she went on.
Emily then joked about her own lack of fashion sense before taking on the role, saying, “I think I’d just been dressing like a teenage boy until that happened, and I learned a lot.”
Last year, Emily revealed that she hasn’t worn the jacket since her and John’s first date, which was back in 2008, and yet, she’s incapable of getting rid of it.
“I don’t wear it. I wore it on John and I’s first date, and I have not thrown it out,” she told Stephen Colbert during a December 2022 appearance on his talk show.
“It’s such an awful jacket! It sits there, and I go, ‘That is a terrible jacket!’” she added, before jokingly divulging that John actually asked her never to wear the garment again.
“He just sent me a memo going: ‘Don’t wear the jacket, and you’ll get another date,’” she laughed.
