Emily Blunt Stole Her Most Vicious Devil Wears Prada Insult From an Awful Mom She Overheard

It’s been nine years since The Devil Wears Prada swept movie audiences into its swirl of deliciously bitchy fashion politics. Since then, there have been some mini-reunions between the comedy’s stars—Meryl Streep terrorized Emily Blunt again in Into the Woods, and Anne Hathaway and Blunt formed something of a book club earlier this month. And while the Runway triumvirate has refused to make the sequel we’ve been yearning for, Blunt did offer up a bit of Devil Wears Prada trivia on Wednesday.

While talking about channeling her bitchy co-assistant character on Howard Stern’s Sirius XM program, the British actress revealed that she actually pulled one of the character’s most cutting lines from a real person.

“I like to soak up people on the street,” Blunt said about her acting process. “I guess I steal from people I meet. Like, I saw a mother speaking to her child in a supermarket when we were shooting that film. And it’s a line that gets quoted back to me now. She yelled at her kid and she kind of opened and closed her hand and she goes [in harsh American accent], ‘Yeah, I’m hearing this, and I want to hear this.’ I went and put it in a movie, when Anne Hathaway is kind of talking to me, and I just told her that [to make her shut up].”

If you don’t remember the line, here it is:

Blunt continued by explaining how real-life people inspire her performances: “For me, that’s what helps me . . . to feel what other people would feel in my skin. And other times I feel like it is the ultimate expression of empathy, to be so interested in people and empathize with them profoundly.”

Is it too much to hope that the Sicario star sees another awful mom chiding her children in public, so Blunt feels inspired enough to revisit her Devil Wears Prada character? Blunt has said that if Streep were on board, she would consider participating in a sequel: “I think I would do it,” she said. Both Streep and Blunt have one hesitation, however, about revisiting the fashion world for a movie. “We all were told to go on these skinny diets for the first time,” Blunt has said. “But I’d be up for it.”