Lydia Tsilipounidaki: Devil Wears Prada 2 Sound Editor

In 2006, Lydia Tsilipounidaki was an apprentice in the ADR department on The Devil Wears Prada, sitting in a building on the same floor as the picture editors and the music team, having lunch with people whose names she'd only read in credits. Nineteen years later, when the sequel came around, she was the one running the room. Supervising sound editor. The full circle isn't lost on her. It mirrors Andy's own arc in the film, apprentice to insider, except Lydia's version took two decades and started on the other side of the planet.

In a conversation for the Zebra Spotlight series, Tsilipounidaki traced that journey: from splicing quarter-inch tape at a Sydney community radio station, to an unpaid year on an Australian feature, to the ADR and dialogue chair on The Devil Wears Prada 2, A Quiet Place: Day One, and the Emmy-winning Ripley. What follows is a working sound editor's account of how a career in film sound actually gets built, and why the way you hear a film at home changes whether the work lands at all.

From Sydney Radio to a Year of Working for Free

Tsilipounidaki didn't set out to edit film sound. She went to Macquarie University in Sydney to study communications, without much of a grand plan. One component of the course was audio, taught on an early digital audio workstation called Deck, software so obscure she says nobody she's met since has ever heard of it. She loved it immediately.

The real hook was radio. Macquarie had a connected community station, 2SER FM, and she got involved, eventually hosting a drive-time show. That meant interviews, recording onto quarter-inch tape, then physically splicing it.

"I just loved the medium of radio. But then there was one awesome show called Audio Days, where people would come in with these crazy pieces of audio spliced together. On one hand it was like, 'What is this?' On the other, I just loved that they were using the medium of sound."

That was the turn. She realised she didn't love radio so much as she loved working in sound. A film lover already, she saw an ad for a workshop with the sound team on Oscar and Lucinda, Gillian Armstrong's film and one of her favourites. She went alone, on a whim, not even knowing that "sound editor" was a job that existed.

There she met Jane Patterson, the film's sound effects editor, who told her to just come in and hang out. She did. She met Andrew Plain, the supervising sound editor, who became one of the most important figures in her career. And then she worked for a year, unpaid.

When the year was up, she asked to work on their next job. They said no. She was devastated. Then they clarified: not for free. They were offering her a paid position as an assistant.

"So I was like, 'Oh, thank god. Okay.' That's how it started."

The lesson she took from Andrew Plain has stayed with her since, and it's not about microphones.

"He used to say the best education I got for this industry was a degree in psychology. And he's a hundred per cent right. This job is about people. It's about the sound and the technology, but more than that it's about relationships: working collaboratively, understanding when to let go and when to push."

The Move to New York and the C5 Internship

Around 25, young because she'd started early and left college at 21, Tsilipounidaki decided she wanted to travel, and figured sound might be the thing to take her there. After a short stint checking out Los Angeles, she landed in New York.

She's quick to compress the hard part into a single clause. Behind "interned and did a few things" sits a long, arduous visa process she waves away. What mattered was a fellow Australian sound supervisor, Ben Cheah, who gave her an internship at C5, a boutique sound facility in New York that still operates today. C5 has a serious lineage. It was started by Skip Lievsay, Ron Bochar, and Phil Stockton, names that carry weight in the American post-sound world.

She came to the US in 2004. Two years later, in 2006, a hallway acquaintance turned into the break.

How She Actually Got On The Devil Wears Prada

The origin story is almost mundane, which is the point. She and Paul Urmson had been running into each other in the hallways. He had an apprentice position open on a film. She accepted, of course. She'd be working under Kenton Jacob, an ADR editor still working today.

The film was The Devil Wears Prada.

"It was fabulous. We were at Sound One, which no longer exists, but we were in the building right next to the picture department and the music department. So we'd have these lunches: the picture editor, the picture assistants, the music editor, all these wonderful people. It was kind of like a dream come true."

Director David Frankel she remembers as genuinely kind, and the relationship stuck. She went on to work on several of his films, including Marley & Me and Collateral Beauty, before reuniting for the sequel. Paul Urmson, she notes, works on all of Frankel's films.

Here is the twenty-year span, laid out plainly.

What ADR Actually Is, and Why the Sequel Needed So Much

For anyone who's never heard the term, Tsilipounidaki gives the clean version. ADR stands for automated dialogue replacement: re-recording an actor's lines in a studio after the film has been shot and edited.

The reasons vary. A director or editor might want a new line. Or the sound editor listens back and finds a recording that's simply unusable.

"It might be them on screen, like us right now, and for some reason the microphone didn't work, or it dropped off. Costume's a big one. Sometimes the costume is really rustly. So we get the actors to come back into the studio after the movie's been shot and edited, and they redo their lines."

The Devil Wears Prada 2 needed a lot of it, and she doesn't sugarcoat this.

"The costumes were really noisy. And apparently there was a lot of paparazzi around during the shoots. I'm not going to sugarcoat it, it was a lot of issues with the dialogue. We used a lot of tools."

The craft of ADR is making that studio recording disappear into the film. Her rule of thumb is to record the replacement with the same microphones used on set, even as modern EQ-matching tools make her wonder whether that's still strictly necessary. The goal never changes.

"In the end, I don't want it to sound like ADR. I want it to sound exactly like it was from that space."

Some actors resist ADR. They feel the performance happened on the day, and this is something after. She understands that completely. Others treat it as a second chance. Meryl Streep walks in and says I can make this better, and does. And she has a theory about who's best at it.

"The Brits are really top-notch at ADR. Must be the theatre background."

The Met Gala Steps: The Hardest Reel to Build

Ask a home cinema enthusiast what grabbed them about the sequel and the answer, at least in this conversation, was the opening. The first few minutes, the noises of New York, the music kicking in, landed hard enough to put a grin on the interviewer's face before a word of plot had registered. Tsilipounidaki's reaction to hearing that was genuine surprise, because she knows exactly how much trouble reel one was.

"That was such a hard reel to make. Dialogue-wise, especially the Met Gala steps, that was really tough because it had to be really full on. Tons of people, music going, you wanted to surge when Miranda gets there. But then suddenly Nigel and Miranda are talking, and it's like, oh my god, how are we going to hear them?"

That's the central magic trick of dialogue editing: keeping the story audible inside the chaos without making it sound artificial. Her answer is that it isn't sound alone. It's editing and camera work too. A good picture editor gets intimate at the right moment so a whisper can carry. The scene she describes is almost entirely ADR, recorded with actors performing at conversational level even though the on-screen energy is enormous, because you can't have Streep screaming a line her character is speaking coolly.

"It's almost a hundred per cent ADR. You want them to project, but that's not what they're doing on screen. And it's exposition, it's trying to tell an important part of the story. It was really tough. But I'm glad you enjoyed it. We enjoyed it in all our hearts."

Dialogue as Emotional Connective Tissue

The through-line of everything Tsilipounidaki does is a conviction that dialogue, and the breath, effort, and vocalisation around it, is what binds an audience to a character. It's not the words alone.

"Sometimes you'll have a close-up of a character sighing and there's no sound there. When I get it, there's no sound, and I'm like, I want to hear that. It adds a little bit more emotion."

That's why she leans on ADR for the non-verbal layer even in effects-heavy films. On A Quiet Place: Day One, where she worked the dialogue side, capturing the lead's breaths and efforts on a set full of noisy special effects was nearly impossible, so a lot of it was rebuilt in the studio.

"We did a lot of breath work with Lupita. That's another hard thing to capture when you're on a set with lots of special effects going on. So I tend to ADR that kind of stuff. Some people don't love it, but it helps you ground yourself to that character."

She's aware A Quiet Place: Day One has become reference material for home cinema demos: the near-silent subway station, then the low-frequency thud as a creature arrives; the theatre scene where a helicopter passes overhead and the creatures move above you in the surround field. When told as much, her response was a delighted "Oh, really?", which tells you something about how invisibly this work is meant to sit.

Ripley, Task, and the Reality of Translation

Two more projects sharpen the picture of her range. On Netflix's black-and-white Ripley, she came in late, brought on by supervisor and mixer Larry Ziff partly because she speaks Italian. She flew to Italy to record the entire Italian loop group over four straight days, working from cue notes written by the other supervising sound editor, Michele Foisy, that she says felt as long as a book. Because Ripley had shot during COVID with empty streets, much of her job was manufacturing the sound of a populated Italy: voices yelling from windows, the texture of a living city. The show won an Emmy.

Then there's Task, which surfaced a problem every home viewer should understand. Showrunner Brad Ingelsby joined a mix review remotely, hearing the audio in stereo rather than the full theatrical mix.

"He was a little taken aback, like, 'This is not how I imagined it. This is not how it sounded when I was sitting there.' And we said, well, there's going to be some translation stuff. Going stereo, the bass isn't going to be as strong."

That gap, between the mix as crafted and the mix as most people actually hear it, is not a minor footnote. On bigger films, teams do dedicated stereo and 5.1 passes precisely because the material will play everywhere. Tsilipounidaki points to Stranger Things and other Netflix productions where every episode gets checked in stereo as standard, and openly wonders whether more of the industry should devote that time, given how many people watch on phones and laptops.

Why the Playback System Is Part of the Performance

The most striking moment came from her own experience with Happy Hour, the Katie Holmes-directed film she supervised and mixed, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. She'd mixed it in a room where it sounded exactly as she imagined. Then she went to hear the digital print, and the sound was inexplicably low.

"It turns out it was a wrapping issue, an issue with how the sound was put on. But it was so disconcerting to mix in that room and hear it beautifully, then go and listen to the digital print and the sound just not do anything to me. Norah Jones did the score, and it's beautiful. But the music was doing nothing for me. It just goes to show how much that can impact your watching experience."

This is the argument for a properly calibrated home cinema, stated by someone with no commercial reason to make it. A film sound team spends months coaxing emotion out of breaths, surrounds, and low-frequency information. If the playback chain fails to reproduce it, whether through wrong levels, collapsed dynamics, or no bass extension, the emotion simply doesn't arrive. The months of work hit a wall at the last three feet.

The flip side is the happy surprise. Watch something on a system that respects the source and details you never knew were there come back into focus, frequencies and depths your old setup couldn't reproduce, exactly as the mixer intended. That's the entire premise of building a calibrated room: not louder, but faithful. When Zebra Home Cinema sizes a screen, sets a seating distance, and tunes a system, the point is that the moment the film starts, it evokes what the people who made it felt in the mix stage.

Teaching the Filmmakers She Wants to Work With

Tsilipounidaki now teaches sound to second-year graduate filmmakers at NYU, having taken it on from a colleague, Tony Martinez. Her framing of the job is pointed.

"I'm trying to mould you into the filmmakers I want to work with, I want to work for."

Her practical advice to those students is unglamorous and exactly right: think about sound before the shoot. Scout the location. Check that the lavalier mics work. Give the sound recordist five minutes before a take to set levels. A little time up front saves enormous effort in post, and she has a specific frustration that recordists don't always get their due.

"Sometimes we don't give enough time to our sound recordists. What is this for, if not understanding the dialogue? It's one component, but it's a pretty big one, especially the on-set capture."

On Being a Woman in the Room

Asked about being a woman in a field still weighted toward men, she's careful and honest. In Australia, she says, women weren't boxed into a specialty. She did effects and dialogue both. In the US she found more specialisation, and a pattern of women gravitating toward dialogue, perhaps because it reads as more acceptable, though she names several enormously talented female effects editors and sound designers. Her own experience, she stresses, is just hers.

"I don't think I've felt pushed back. But I don't know either."

Where she does feel a hurdle is mixing. As a dialogue person, she wanted to mix for a long time before she felt able to, until sitting with Skip Lievsay and others who took the mystique out of it.

"For a long time it felt so technical. And it is, I don't want to say it's not. But it's also just about using your ears. It's not rocket science. Skip was like, 'What's the big deal? You should do that.'"

She recently finished mixing an indie film. A steep learning curve, she says, and enormous fun.

What's Next

Beyond Happy Hour premiering at Tribeca, she's clearly energised by smaller work. Going from The Devil Wears Prada 2 to a small indie was, in her words, night and day, but a chance to be more creative and collaborate closely. Which, for someone who insists this whole craft is really about people, sounds less like a step down than a return to the thing she got into it for.

Key Takeaways

• ▪Lydia Tsilipounidaki went from apprentice in the ADR department on The Devil Wears Prada (2006) to supervising sound editor on The Devil Wears Prada 2, roughly a twenty-year climb that started with an unpaid year on an Australian feature after a workshop on Oscar and Lucinda.
• ▪Her specialism is dialogue and ADR (automated dialogue replacement): re-recording lines in a studio when the original is unusable, then matching it so seamlessly into the production that the audience never notices. The sequel needed a lot of it, thanks to noisy costumes and paparazzi on set.
• ▪She believes dialogue and the non-verbal layer around it, the breaths, sighs, and efforts, are what emotionally connect an audience to a character, which is why she rebuilds them in the studio even on effects-heavy films like A Quiet Place: Day One.
• ▪Her credits span Marley & Me, Collateral Beauty, the Emmy-winning Ripley (where she recorded the Italian loop group), Task, and Happy Hour, the Katie Holmes-directed film she both supervised and mixed.
• ▪A film's mix only lands if the playback system reproduces it faithfully. Her own experience of hearing a broken digital print of Happy Hour, beautiful score but no emotional impact, is the clearest case for a properly calibrated home cinema: the emotion the sound team built only arrives if the room can deliver it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the supervising sound editor of The Devil Wears Prada 2?

Lydia Tsilipounidaki, a New York-based sound supervisor and sound editor originally from Sydney, Australia. She specialises in dialogue and ADR. Remarkably, she was an apprentice in the ADR department on the original The Devil Wears Prada in 2006, making the sequel a full-circle moment roughly twenty years in the making.

What is ADR in film sound?

ADR stands for automated dialogue replacement: re-recording an actor's lines in a studio after the film has been shot and edited. It's used when the original on-set recording is unusable, such as a dropped microphone, a rustling costume, or background noise, or when a director wants to add or change a line. The craft is matching the studio recording so closely to the production sound that the audience can't tell it was replaced.

Why did The Devil Wears Prada 2 need so much ADR?

According to Tsilipounidaki, the costumes were very noisy and there was a lot of paparazzi around during filming, which created significant problems with the on-set dialogue. The team used a range of dialogue-cleanup tools and re-recorded a large amount of the dialogue. The Met Gala steps sequence in reel one is almost entirely ADR.

What other films has Lydia Tsilipounidaki worked on?

Her credits include The Devil Wears Prada and its sequel, Marley & Me, Collateral Beauty (all David Frankel films), A Quiet Place: Day One, the Emmy-winning limited series Ripley, the series Task and Vladimir, and Happy Hour, the Katie Holmes-directed film she supervised and mixed, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Does the sound mix change depending on how you watch a film?

Yes, significantly. A theatrical Atmos or 5.1 mix is deliberately re-worked into stereo and home versions because bass extension, surround information, and dynamic range translate differently across devices. Tsilipounidaki describes showrunners being taken aback hearing a stereo feed of a mix crafted in a full theatrical setup, which is exactly why a properly calibrated home cinema matters for reproducing what the sound team intended.

Why does a calibrated home cinema matter for film sound?

Because the emotion a sound team builds, from breaths to surrounds to low-frequency impact, only reaches you if the playback system can reproduce it. Tsilipounidaki once heard a faulty digital print of a film she'd mixed and found the beautiful score did nothing for her because the sound wasn't delivered correctly. A calibrated system with proper levels, dynamics, and bass extension lets a film land the way its creators heard it in the mix stage.