The Man Nobody Is Talking About in 'The Devil Wears Prada 2'

The Devil Wears Prada 2 hits theaters this weekend, and the original cast is largely intact, but for Adrian Grenier, who played Nate, Andy Sachs’ drippy boyfriend in the 2006 original. People have opinions about this. Too many opinions, frankly, for a character whose primary function was to look vaguely wounded while Anne Hathaway became interesting. There’s even a Starbucks commercial devoted to this omission for some reason.

As I was rewatching the original ahead of the sequel, however, I began to wonder why no one is talking about the fact that Andy’s other love interest in The Devil Wears Prada isn’t in it, either.

Do you remember that Simon Baker was in the original? Me neither. Not until I rewatched it. The guy best known now as the title character in The Mentalist played Christian Thompson, the charming book editor who is basically the movie’s version of Mr. Big, who ultimately sleeps with Andy in Paris while Nate is back home making grilled cheese.

Outside of Stanley Tucci’s character, he’s also the most important male character in the entire film.

Nate was basically a metaphor for the life Andy is outgrowing, the relationship that can’t survive her ambition, the guy who thinks her becoming someone means she’s becoming someone else. Boo this man! He’s boring, and Grenier’s Entourage association notwithstanding, he doesn’t belong in the sequel anyway. Imagine who Andy would be if she’d actually stayed with Nate.

Christian Thompson, on the other hand … he represented what Andy could have been had she followed her ambition instead of the 2006 version of a female lead in a romantic comedy. Maybe he’s not Miranda Priestly’s Devil, but he was definitely one of the archangels trying to knock her off. But after a night in the sheets with Christian, Andy’s moral compass kicked in, and she decided, pointlessly, to save Miranda’s job, a task that Miranda had already accomplished without the aid of Andy because when you come at the Queen, you best not miss.

And then the movie ends, and Andy walks away from all of it — Miranda, Christian, and the fashion world — and reconciles with Nate, because that’s what 2006 required of her. I’m not saying that the better movie is the one where Andy ditched Nate, stayed in bed, and climbed whatever ladder he helped put in front of her. But I’m not not saying that, either. Because let’s be honest: The go-getter do-gooder job she interviewed for at the end of the film at the New York Mirror doesn’t even exist anymore. It’s been bought and merged with another New York newspaper that peddles political conspiracy and Mar-a-Lago gossip, or it’s been sold for parts. And in that actual reality, Andy is on her 9th journalist job in 18 years and about to accept a buyout from a tech billionaire who has brought in a MAGA-coded editor to run the place after it settled a $200 billion lawsuit with the administration for $15 million and total fealty.

Meanwhile, Simon Baker is out there somewhere — most recently in Scarpetta — presumably still handsome, and nobody is asking the sequel what happened to the guy Andy met in Paris. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe Andy buried him so completely that even the audience forgot he existed. Or maybe we’re all just as susceptible to Nate’s particular brand of wounded mediocrity as Andy was. God, he sucked.

For Andy’s sake, I hope the sequel does away with the fairy tale ending, because our current reality certainly has.