Before The Devil Wears Prada 2 Opens, Let’s Talk About Meryl…
The Devil Wears Prada 2 opens May 1. Before Miranda Priestly returns, here are the five Meryl Streep performances that prove she’s in a class of her own.
She has been the best actor working in film for 50 years. Here’s the evidence.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 opens one week from today, May 1, and the early word is exactly what you’d expect: Meryl Streep, dressed in Prada and wielding silence like a scalpel, is the best thing in it. Again. As she has been in virtually everything she’s touched for five decades.
The sequel reunites the original main cast — Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci — with director David Frankel and writer Aline Brosh McKenna, and introduces new characters including Kenneth Branagh, Simone Ashley, Lucy Liu, and Lady Gaga. The story focuses on Miranda struggling to manage the gradual downfall of print magazine publishing, with Andy becoming her new features editor. WikipediaMSN
But this isn’t the article about the sequel. This is the article about the woman who makes the sequel worth watching. Before you buy your ticket, here’s the case for Meryl Streep as the greatest screen actor of her generation — with five films that prove it.
1. Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
This is where the world found out. Streep’s Joanna Kramer is a woman leaving her marriage and her child, and the film doesn’t let her be a villain for it. She won her first Academy Award for Supporting Actress here, but what she does in the courtroom scene — improvised, raw, devastating — is not supporting-role work. It’s the engine of the entire film. She was 30 years old.
2. Sophie’s Choice (1982)
The one everyone cites, and the citation is correct. Streep plays a Polish Holocaust survivor living in Brooklyn, and the film asks her to be funny, sexual, tortured, and ultimately broken — sometimes in the same scene. She won Best Actress. She also learned Polish and German for the role, with a specific regional accent. This is the performance that established that Streep wasn’t operating on a normal actor’s frequency.
3. Silkwood (1983)
The underseen one. Directed by Mike Nichols, based on the true story of Karen Silkwood, a nuclear plant worker who became a whistleblower and died under disputed circumstances. Streep is unglamorous, physical, funny, and frightening here. No Oscar nomination for this one — which tells you more about Oscar than about Streep. Roger Ebert called it one of the best performances he’d seen. He was right.
4. Adaptation (2002)
The audacity of this choice. Charlie Kaufman wrote a movie about a screenwriter who can’t adapt a book, and Streep plays the book’s author — a real person, Susan Orlean — in a script that makes her character a fictional composite with a secret life. She’s operating inside three layers of meta-commentary and she’s still the most naturalistic person on screen. Nicolas Cage is brilliant in the film. Streep is on another planet.
5. The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
The one that made her a meme without diminishing the performance at all. Miranda Priestly is ice and architecture — every pause is a decision, every whisper lands like a verdict. What makes it a great performance and not just a great character is how much loneliness Streep embeds in the monster. The scene where Miranda’s mask slips, just briefly, in the hotel room — that’s where you see it. Most actors would underline it. Streep buries it.
Why She Still Matters Now
Early reviews note that Streep still wears Miranda Priestly like a finely-tailored suit in this sequel. That’s not nothing after 20 years. The risk in returning to an iconic role is that you remind the audience how good the original was and make them miss it. By all accounts, Streep doesn’t do that. She does what she’s always done: she makes you forget you’re watching an actor. Rotten Tomatoes
The film debuted exclusively in theaters May 1, 2026, rated PG-13, runtime 1 hour 59 minutes. Wikipedia
The Devil Wears Prada 2 opens Thursday, May 1. Go for the fashion. Stay for Streep. You know how this goes.