Real woman The Devil Wears Prada’s Emily is based on shares shady reason she was so ‘mean’

The woman who inspired Emily in The Devil Wears Prada has come forward for the first time ever, ahead of the second film being released, and she’s revealed the shady reason she wasn’t very nice to her staff.

New York-based celebrity red carpet stylist Leslie Fremar is the “real-life Emily,” who used to work at Vogue with the author of The Devil Wears Prada, Lauren Weisberger. Fremar was Anna Wintour’s first assistant, and Weisberger was her deputy. In film terms, Wintour is Miranda Priestly, Fremar is Emily Charlton and Weisberger is Andy Sachs.

Weisberger only worked at Vogue for eight months. A few years lafter she left, Fremar found out that she had written a book about them. “She’s me—I am Emily,” she told Vogue’s The Run-Through podcast in a new interview this week. “I don’t think I’ve ever really talked about it.”

Credit: Kyle Goldberg/BFA.com/Shutterstock

Remembering the moment she found out about the book, she said: “I got a call from Anna’s office saying that she wanted to see me… [Wintour] said, ‘Who’s Lauren Weisberger?’ And I said, ‘She was your junior assistant. She was only here for a short period of time – maybe eight months’. And she’s like, ‘Well, she wrote a book about us, and you’re worse than me’. I wanted to, like, ask more questions, but you can’t really ask her that many questions.”

Fremar vividly remembers saying the now-iconic line to Weisberger: “A million girls would kill for this job.” She really believed it was true, and said it because the now-famous author clearly “didn’t want to be there”.

When she realised the book had been written about her, she said it felt like a “betrayal”. “It just felt like this exposure. 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,” she recalled.

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Credit: 20th Century Fox

Fremar admitted that she “probably was not very nice” but claimed it was because she was having to do Weisberger’s job as well, in a shady dig at the author. Brutal!

“I think this idea that the Emily character is not very pleasant or nice or seems high-strung is because 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,” she said. “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.”

They “never talked again” after Weisberger left Vogue, and Fremar said it would be “very awkward” if they reunited now.

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Featured image credit: 20th Century Fox and Kyle Goldberg/BFA.com/Shutterstock