What happened to Nate in The Devil Wears Prada 2? Adrian Grenier admits the fan hate played its part

The Devil Wears Prada 2 got the whole band back together. Miranda. Andy. Emily. Nigel. Two decades later, everyone came running back to Runway like it was a high school reunion with better tailoring.

Everyone except one man. There is a cerulean-sized hole in this movie where Nate used to be, and the film does not spend a single frame explaining it. No phone call. No throwaway line. Nothing. The grilled-cheese guy has simply been vaporized from the timeline.

A brief history of the internet's most hated boyfriend

If you missed the last two decades of discourse: Nate is the boyfriend who sulked through Andy's entire glow-up, weaponized a birthday party, and delivered the legendary guilt trip "the person whose calls you always take, that's the relationship you're in" while she was crying on a curb in Paris. Sometime around 2020, the internet collectively re-watched the movie and reclassified him from "love interest" to "the actual villain."

And here's the fun part — Adrian Grenier agrees. During the film's 2021 reunion he admitted the takes cooked him so thoroughly he had to grow as a person to understand them:

"Nate hadn't grown up, but Andy had… she needed more out of life, and she was achieving it. He couldn't support her like she needed because he was a fragile, wounded boy."

Anne Hathaway, ever the diplomat, limited herself to noting that Nate "was pouty on his birthday because his girlfriend wasn't there!" Even the defense attorney thinks you did it, babe.

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So the hate actually worked?

According to the man himself — kind of, yeah. Grenier has been remarkably chill about being the only lead left off the guest list, but he's not pretending he doesn't know why:

"Obviously, it was a disappointment that I didn't get the call to be in the sequel. But I also understand there was some backlash with Nate, the character, so that might have something to do with it."

Director David Frankel tells a softer version, insisting he wanted a cameo but "it was just too late in our production schedule to make it happen." Sure. Twenty years of lead time, but the schedule got him. Grenier, to his credit, has leaned all the way into the bit — he even did a Starbucks ad joking that maybe we should just "leave Nate in 2006."

What Andy got instead

The sequel quietly hands Andy an upgrade package:

• a thriving journalism career and her name on serious work;
• a new love interest, Peter — an easygoing contractor played by Colin From Accounts' Patrick Brammall;
• exactly zero men pouting about port-wine reductions.

Peter's defining romantic gesture is that he actually read Andy's articles before their first date, which Slate's critic summed up with surgical precision: "sweet, but the bar is on the floor." The bar being on the floor is, of course, Nate's lasting legacy. He may not be in the movie, but his absence is doing a full supporting performance.

Somewhere out there, a man in a fleece is making grilled cheese for one. Step it up, Nates of the world. You saw what happened.

Previously we wrote: Krysten Ritter's Jessica Jones returns in Daredevil: Born Again season 2 — now a mother, and her powers "drop out"