Rachel takes a break from comedy to go on the run
RAchel Brosnahan may be American, but she believes a little bit of her funny bone is British. Brosnahan is famous for The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, Amazon Prime’s smash comedy hit in which she plays New Yorker Midge, the ‘perfect housewife’ from the Upper West side who becomes a Downtown stand-up (specialising in mocking men) after her marriage breaks up.
Brosnahan’s feature film choices have been astute, too. check her out as Jean, first seen lounging in a magenta negligee ( above) in director Julia hart’s superbly plotted 1970s set crime thriller I’m Your Woman. Written with Jordan horowitz, a producer of la la land, it also features a fine performance from london’s Arinze kene, making his hollywood film debut.
some folks have underrated it; but I was hooked on its darkly humorous tone. As Brosnahan puts it, Jean goes from being ‘caught inside the void inside her head, into this quiet woman’s action hero’, after her husband brings home a longed-for baby (which he claims he just found).
soon, Jean and the child — his name is harry — are forced to go on the run, aided by cal, a mysterious bodyguard played by kene.
The film is, by turns, frightening and funny. When I mention her genius comic timing, there’s a wry laugh from Brosnahan.
‘early in my career I was told that [comedy] was not a path I should pursue,’ she said — though the gift was evident when she got her first big break in house Of cards as call-girl Rachel Posner.
I told her I thought her humour had a British feel to it.
‘I’m certain that’s true,’ she responded. ‘At least the self-deprecating part. self- deprecation comes with the tea over there,’ she joked from New York, where she is working on pre-production for a fourth season of Mrs Maisel, which may be able to begin filming next month.
‘My mom’s from leeds,’ she explained. ‘My grandparents lived in Buckinghamshire and, yeah, I spent a lot of time there as a kid.’ (she also has an aunt and uncle in haslemere, surrey.) On the American side of the family Rachel is the niece of the late fashion designer kate spade. ‘I feel half and half . . . or arf and arf,’ she said, adopting a mock cockney accent as she told how she spent summers and other holidays in the Uk, watching Postman Pat and Teletubbies when she was little, before moving on to Anne Robinson in The Weakest link, Ab Fab, skins and little Britain. It’s also where she was introduced to pantomimes. ‘I loved those,’ she sighed. don’t have them here. she remembers her mother, carol, having to adopt a U.s. twang to make herself understood in their upmarket Illinois neighbourhood. ‘she still has an accent — and Americans still have problems with foreign accents, of any kind,’ she said. Brosnahan was impressed, though, by kene’s American accent. she described her costar in I’m Your Woman (the title comes from a ‘We comment made by Tuesday Weld to James caan in the 1981 Michael Mann caper movie Thief) as a ‘magnetic actor’.
Their scenes together have heat, even though their characters are not romantically linked.
At one point, they do a fab impromptu rendering of Aretha Franklin’s Natural Woman while sitting in a diner with baby harry. Although they had three infants to take turns as harry, ‘the one in the diner was a fake’, Brosnahan said — as was the one in another scene, where Jean and cal are harassed by a white police officer as they try to rest in a parked car.
‘I remember that day,’ kene told me recently. ‘It’s risky being black in America. And remember: this was the seventies. African-American people have been arrested and killed for sleeping in their cars.’
kene, who lives in hackney, is a big fan of Mrs Maisel; and admitted he ‘fan-boyed’ Brosnahan when he first met her. But most of his time — and hers, for that matter — was spent trying to keep the babies happy.
‘The scene is written one way, and you add a live baby into the equation, and the scene becomes something different,’ he said. ‘Babies don’t read scripts, man; last time I checked.
‘They come in and, actually, they’re not even performing. It’s very disarming. That was the most peek-a-boo I’ve played in my life.’
The actor’s about to start filming a new project. And later next year he’ll star as Bob Marley in the musical Marley, set to open at the lyric, shaftesbury Avenue.