Miranda Priestly is a force to be reckoned with in The Devil Wears Prada. Though the film’s plot revolves around a young woman named Andy who is hired as Priestly’s assistant, the domineering fashion magazine executive truly drives the story, creating the primary tension in the movie and casting a sheen of icy glamour over the whole thing.

Priestly—played to perfection by Meryl Streep—is most commonly associated with Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor who shares Priestly’s penchant for sharp hairstyles and oversized sunglasses. While Wintour and Priestly have always been linked, it turns out that the former wasn’t who Streep initially looked to while crafting the character.

1. Clint Eastwood
2. Mike Nichols
3. Anna Wintour

Clint Eastwood

Despite Priestly’s connections to Wintour, Streep has always emphasized the fact that she actually largely based Priestly’s personality on men. “The thing that’s fun about this character is that I was using my role models, different people that I know, and most of them are men. So that gave me some freedom too,” Streep said in a 2026 Vogue interview.

One of the men who Streep has cited as an inspiration for the character of Priestly is the actor, director, and producer Clint Eastwood. Specifically, Eastwood helped inspired Priestly’s low, impossible-to-ignore voice. “Clint would never raise his voice,” Streep said in an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in which she discussed the inspirations for Priestly. “He would direct and people had to lean forward to hear what he was saying.”

Mike Nichols

In the Colbert interview, Streep also cited director and comedian Mike Nichols as a key figure who shaped her portrayal of Priestly. The two worked together on the films Heartburn and Angels in America, among others, and Streep has extensively praised Nichols over the years—and apparently, his leadership style helped her craft her Devil Wears Prada character.

“I was basically imitating Mike Nichols that whole time,” Streep said. “If Mike Nichols and Clint Eastwood had a baby…it would be Miranda Priestly.”

Specifically, she said she emulated Nichols’ tendency to mix seriousness with wit. “The command on the set…Mike would do it sort of with a sly humor,” she added. “People take it as mean, but it’s funny. I think it’s funny.” She added that Nichols was “thrilled” when he heard that he helped inspire one of the most famously intimidating executives in film.

Anna Wintour

The Devil Wears Prada is based on a book of the same name by Lauren Weisberger, who actually worked as an assistant to Anna Wintour for about a year beginning in 1999. The book is a work of fiction, but Weisberger based it on her own experiences at Vogue. However, in early interviews, Weisberger claimed that “nothing was based on Anna.”

Still, the similarities between Priestly and Wintour are rather blindingly obvious. When director David Frankel took on the film, he addressed the connections between the characters and specifically said he refused to create a project centered around bashing Wintour. “Anna Wintour does extraordinary work, and this is going to be a love letter to working women who do excellent work,” he said at the time. 

Wintour herself was invited to a special screening of the film before it premiered. She attended with her daughter, Bee, who reportedly turned to her mother and said, “Mom, they really got you” at one point during the screening.

Nearly two decades after the first film’s release, Wintour seems to have embraced the link between herself and Priestly, and Streep appears to have done the same. The fashion executive and the movie star appeared together on the cover of Vogue in 2026, and in their interview, Streep admitted that she based some of her character in the sequel on Wintour.

“In terms of Miranda, and coming back to that character 20 years later, I did think honestly about Anna and tried to imagine what it was like to carry her responsibility and to be as interested in the world and curious as she must have to be,” Streep said. “That’s the key, I think, to being alive: Always breaking new water. Always breaking the waves. And we’re not done yet.”

Wintour herself addressed the character for the first time in a 2024 interview with the BBC, saying it’s “for the audience and for the people I work with to decide if there are any similarities between me and Miranda Priestly.” 

But in the 2026 Vogue interview, she fully embraced Streep’s onscreen portrayal of herself, while acknowledging that she and Priestly aren’t exactly the same. “First of all, I’d like to say it’s such an honor to be played by Meryl, however distant Miranda is from myself. Who wouldn’t think that that wasn’t the most extraordinary gift?” Wintour said. She went on to elaborate on the joy she takes in the age she and Streep both shared at the time of the interview: 76.

“I like my age. I feel as alive, excited, and aware as ever, and I like to learn from my children and from all my teams around the world,” she continued. “It’s always exciting. And I think with experience, you have a sense of balance and proportion, and you know that life is not perfect and that things will go wrong and you’re just going to give it your best shot. But if it doesn’t work, you have to move on. I feel age is actually an advantage.”

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