The sequel to The Devil Wears Prada, which swans into theaters this weekend<\/a>, has me reflecting on an important question: Is our society more or less shallow now than it was in 2006? The easy answer is that we are much improved. We can look back on all the body-shaming and tabloid toxicity of the past and make documentaries and write op-eds that call it what it was. We can be comfortable in our certainty that the first Devil Wears Prada\u2019s recurring joke about its star Anne Hathaway being an unfashionable Size 6 would never fly today. The new movie itself makes hay of how much the thinking around bodies has shifted: An assistant is tasked with editing the most offensive language of Meryl Streep\u2019s Miranda Priestly in real time so as to keep her out of human resources\u2019 crosshairs. But I\u2019m not convinced we\u2019ve evolved as much as we\u2019d like to think. I know this because the moment I laid eyes on Patrick Brammall, Hathaway\u2019s love interest in DWP2, I thought to myself, Oh, the internet is not going to be happy about this.<\/p>\n Brammall, an Australian actor best known for a well-liked but little-seen television rom-com called Colin From Accounts, plays a contractor named Peter in the movie. Hathaway\u2019s Andy meets him when a friend drags her to look at apartments, arguing that she is too successful to continue occupying the hovel she\u2019s living in at the start of the movie. (It\u2019s not actually a hovel; it looks perfectly nice and would probably rent for at least $3,500 in real life. Its only flaw is that the water comes out brown. Hello, it\u2019s called a Brita filter.) When Andy encounters Peter in the model apartment, she says some slightly disparaging things about what she does not realize is his chosen profession of gutting old buildings. He doesn\u2019t mind, though. When Patrick arrives to their first date having boned up on her journalism work, she\u2019s impressed, because none of her other boyfriends ever bothered. He\u2019s sweet, but the bar is on the floor.<\/p>\n I want to be very clear that Brammall is not bad-looking. Does anyone have a megaphone I can say that into? HE\u2019S DECENTLY HANDSOME, OK? He has a bit of Ewan McGregor\u2013meets\u2013The Pitt\u2019s Dr. Abbott about him, and with the accent to boot, he\u2019s a catch. It\u2019s just that Anne Hathaway is a goddess. She always has been, but after enduring a few years of her career where everyone decided to hate her for no reason\u2014something we seem to require of all female celebrities now; see why I am reluctant to accept that things are so much better these days?\u2014she is currently enjoying something of a resurgence. It\u2019s like the spell wore off and everyone remembered how great she is. We all love whatever she did to her face, which she insists was not a facelift but a trick her stylists do with braids<\/a>.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, one of the most popular modes of celebrating a favorite star lately seems to involve insisting that the men surrounding them are unworthy. Maybe I just have permanent brain damage from living through the online conversation about Materialists last year<\/a>, but it truly surprises me how acceptable it\u2019s become to call men broke or ugly and how praising someone\u2019s looks has become synonymous with praising their virtue. It\u2019s this kind of stuff: Anne Hathaway deserves her success because her facecard is lethal. (If you don\u2019t like the term facecard, you\u2019ll be horrified to hear that I\u2019m now also seeing people talk about their fave celebrities\u2019 bodycards.) Megan Thee Stallion never should have dated<\/a> Klay Thompson because he is ugly. Margaret Qualley is beauty personified and Jack Antonoff is a worm. So it\u2019s not that I have a problem with Brammall\u2019s looks, though I can plainly see he is not a model, but I am familiar enough with this worldview that I\u2019m currently girding my loins for all the discussions people are about to have about how Peter \u201cwasn\u2019t good enough\u201d or, worse, \u201cwasn\u2019t hot enough\u201d for Andy.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Read More<\/b>\n <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n I am confident in this partly because it\u2019s one of people\u2019s favorite things to debate about the original movie. Fans will recall that Andy\u2019s boyfriend in the 2006 film was a chef named Nate played by Adrian Grenier. In 2006, Grenier was the star of HBO\u2019s Entourage and a hot young thing on par with Hathaway, but their careers since veered in different directions; hers to the A-list, and his, well, not<\/a>. (Grenier has expressed disappointment that he wasn\u2019t asked to be in the sequel.) Declaring that, actually, Nate was the real villain of The Devil Wears Prada has become a \u201cDie Hard is actually a Christmas movie\u201d\u2013like clich\u00e9 online in the years since the movie was released. This is a little unfair insomuch as it seems like a way of dumping on Grenier for not having quite as brilliant a trajectory as his co-star. It also misses the point that, as the A.V. Club once argued<\/a>, one of the geniuses of the 2006 film\u2019s script, which was written by Aline Brosh McKenna (who returned to write the sequel), is that it \u201cpurposefully relegates [the love interests] to the kind of thinly written, thankless roles that women usually have to play in big studio comedies.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/compote.slate.com\/images\/c015333b-4047-4baf-961c-0814e62a1f07.jpeg?crop=1560%2C1040%2Cx0%2Cy0&width=140\")
\n <\/div>\nScaachi Koul<\/h4>\n
She\u2019s the Only Sane Celebrity In America. This Is How She Did It.<\/h3>\n