Twenty years after The Devil Wears Prada, Anne Hathaway can still remember exactly what it felt like to be the actress Hollywood was not rushing to cast.

While promoting The Devil Wears Prada 2 alongside Emily Blunt in 2026, Hathaway revisited one of the strangest facts behind the original film: she says she was the ninth choice to play aspiring journalist Andrea “Andy” Sachs. Asked whether she remembered the women who came before her, Hathaway joked that their names were still “tattooed on my brain.”

It is an extraordinary piece of casting history because Andy now seems inseparable from Hathaway. The awkward first arrival at Runway. The gradual fashion transformation. The uneasy mix of ambition, insecurity and determination as Andy tries to survive under Meryl Streep’s formidable Miranda Priestly.

But in the mid-2000s, the studio was looking elsewhere.

Hathaway had already become famous through The Princess Diaries and its sequel, and she had begun moving toward more adult material with films including Brokeback Mountain. Even so, Fox 2000 wanted a more established dramatic star for Andy, according to director David Frankel and former studio president Elizabeth Gabler.

At the top of the studio’s wish list was Rachel McAdams.

McAdams was coming off an extraordinary run that included Mean Girls and The Notebook, and Fox was so interested that Frankel later said the role was offered to her three times.

She declined each time.

“The studio was determined to have her, and she was determined not to do it,” Frankel later recalled.

McAdams’ decision was not simply a matter of failing to recognize a future hit. She was deliberately stepping away from the intense Hollywood momentum surrounding her career. Years later, she acknowledged having moments of doubt about declining major projects, but said she also knew she needed distance from the industry at that stage of her life.

And she was hardly the only major name connected to Andy.

Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman, Kate Hudson and Kirsten Dunst were among the actresses considered during the casting process. Claire Danes and Juliette Lewis were also among the performers linked to auditions for the role. Hudson later admitted that passing on The Devil Wears Prada was one career decision she regretted, explaining that scheduling had prevented her from making it work.

While the studio searched, Hathaway kept pushing.

She did not treat the lack of immediate enthusiasm as a rejection. Instead, she repeatedly made her case to the filmmakers and executives.

Gabler remembered Hathaway sitting in her office explaining not only why she wanted the role, but also offering thoughts about the screenplay. Hathaway kept calling and campaigning. In perhaps the most memorable example of her persistence, she visited Fox executive Carla Hacken’s office and wrote two words in Hacken’s small Zen garden:

“Hire me.”

What Hathaway saw in Andy was more than a fashionable studio comedy.

She later explained that the material connected with her emotionally. The story took ambition and professional identity seriously while still being funny and accessible. In 2026, she described feeling an almost magnetic pull toward the project — strong enough that she believed she simply had to find a way into the movie.

Then one of the most powerful people involved in the film helped change the conversation.

Meryl Streep had already agreed to play Miranda Priestly. Frankel recalled that Streep watched Hathaway’s small but dramatic performance in Brokeback Mountain, met with her and then contacted Fox chairman Tom Rothman to say she believed Hathaway was good and that the two could work well together.

The endorsement mattered.

Eventually, the call came.

Hathaway later remembered being at home with friends when she learned she had won the role. She jumped up and ran through her apartment screaming that she was going to be in The Devil Wears Prada.

In retrospect, the studio’s initial hesitation became part of what made the casting so effective.

Andy is supposed to enter Runway as an outsider. She does not understand why the people around her treat fashion with such reverence. She initially believes she is above the superficiality of the industry, only to discover that both the work and the people doing it are more complicated than she assumed.

Hathaway could play that uncertainty without making Andy passive. Her established screen warmth made the character approachable, while the more dramatic side of her performance allowed audiences to see Andy slowly becoming tougher, more capable and more conflicted.

Standing opposite Streep was also a formidable assignment.

Hathaway has said she genuinely felt intimidated during parts of filming, although she always felt that Streep was looking out for her as a fellow performer. During one difficult emotional scene, Hathaway remembered Streep subtly adjusting her own performance in a way that helped Hathaway break through and deliver what the moment needed.

The results went far beyond what the filmmakers initially expected.

Made for roughly $35 million, The Devil Wears Prada earned about $326 million worldwide. It received two Academy Award nominations, including Best Actress for Streep and Best Costume Design for Patricia Field. Screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna has since described the original as a relatively modest movie whose eventual cultural reach far exceeded expectations.

Its influence also lasted.

The film became more than a collection of Miranda Priestly quotes and famous outfits. Its debates about ambition, difficult bosses, career sacrifices and the compromises people make while trying to succeed have kept generating conversation long after its 2006 release.

And in the film’s 20th-anniversary year, Hathaway returned as Andy alongside Streep, Blunt and Stanley Tucci in The Devil Wears Prada 2, released May 1, 2026.

For Hathaway, returning also meant looking back at the young woman who first played Andy.

She recently described herself as feeling lost at 22, something she now believes unexpectedly served the character. Two decades later, both the actress and Andy could be revisited from an entirely different stage of life.

That may be what makes the original casting story feel so perfect now.

Andy Sachs begins The Devil Wears Prada as the person no one in the room expects to belong there.

Anne Hathaway, in her own way, arrived under remarkably similar circumstances.

She was not the studio’s dream choice. She was not the actress executives chased three times. She had to campaign, wait and convince people that they were overlooking the right person.

Then she got the job.

Twenty years later, the remarkable part is no longer that Anne Hathaway was ninth on the list.

It is trying to imagine who could possibly have been first.