The Marvelous Mrs Maisel’s Rachel Brosnahan: ‘You can always find a way forward’
During lockdown in New York, Rachel Brosnahan really got into Survivor. Like, really into it. There are 40 seasons of this reality show where contestants are marooned and left to fend for themselves, and for her and her husband Jason, this was… a re-watch. “It really is a mirror for our society,” she chirrups over Zoom, in the way people deep into a reality show sometimes do. “People from all different walks of life thrown together in a survival situation.” She has the Survivor patter, she has the Survivor socks, she has the Survivor water bottle, and, importantly, she has learned the Survivor lessons. Having completed the final series she graduated to a History Channel show called Alone, which is the same, but lonely. If Brosnahan were to be dropped into a jungle tomorrow, she’s confident she’d be absolutely fine. “I’ve picked up a thing or two.” Short pause while she considers it with some seriousness. “That is, if I had time to prepare. If not, I’d definitely get eaten.”
Brosnahan used to wrestle. A bookish “serious nerd” born in Milwaukee, she grew up in a sporty family, eventually persuading her publisher father and British mother that, though she’d been a snowboarding tutor and on the school wrestling team for years, her future was on stage.
In 2013, while still at drama school in New York, she was cast in a fiveline role in House of Cards as “Call Girl”. After two episodes she’d impressed the director so much that her character was given the honour of a name, and after another she was written into the series, only being left behind two series later in a shallow Mexican grave. Which was fine, because she rose again. The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, in which she plays a 50s housewife turned standup comic, arrived on Amazon Prime in 2017, arguably a bad time for the world, but a good time for a comedy that veered joyfully into magical realism and told the story of a woman finding liberation through humour. Before Brosnahan was cast as Miriam “Midge” Maisel, at 27, showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino said she had always been “the girl that someone’s tied up and thrown in the back of a van”. No more. In candy-coloured dresses and tiny hats, and corsetry that injured her at least once, Brosnahan trotted into stardom.
She is calling from the desert. It’s morning there, and she turns her laptop towards the window to show me the miles of sand beyond, with its pimples of grass, the impossible sky, a single cloud. Here in London the sun set at teatime and it’s been raining since dawn. “I could turn off the camera,” she offers kindly. But no, I will accept this agony for the pleasure of spending a minute with the Marvellous Rachel Brosnahan, whose makeup-less skin appears to emit, rather than reflect, the Santa Fe light, and whose earnest positivity is, well, a balm.
Three seasons ofMaisel saw Midge transforming her experiences as a wealthy Jewish housewife – the kind of woman who wakes up twice every night, first to remove her makeup, then again at dawn to reapply it, so her husband is never greeted without lipstick – into a standup career. She puts her family’s dinner on the table, then sneaks out to serve it up again as a punchline. The show became beloved by inter-generational audiences as much for its tap-dancing dialogue and rich Technicolor beauty as its cheery smallf feminism. “I spent a lot of time trying to ramp up my internal metronome to the speed of Midge and trying to channel her confidence, which,” Brosnahan chuckles mournfully, “remains one of the most challenging things about playing this part.”
While she plays Maisel as a whirling, perfumed storm of conviction, Brosnahan is cautious and shy – this year she has come to identify as an introvert, someone who becomes exhausted after interacting with too many people. But recently she’s noticed she’s able to channel Midge. “I catch myselfsometimes, in situations where I feel vulnerable, turning it on without realising. I’ve seen red-carpet interviews where I’m talking a million miles an hour and being like, who is that?” She is grateful for this skill. She is grateful for this work. “It’s like free therapy. My sense of empathy has grown enormously in the 12 years I’ve been doing this because you have to figure out how to embody people that are so far away from who you are. But it’s also… really weird. A really weird job.”
One of the weirdest things she found when playing Mrs Maisel were the judgments made on the character as a mother. Midge is a woman who can do anything, be it cook the perfect brisket, bring down the house at the Gaslight or seduce Lenny Bruce, but not, it seemed to critics, care for her two young children. “The backlash against Midge’s mothering was a rude and surprising awakening as a woman who does not have children. I was not expecting that. This is a comedy about a woman who’s discovering her voice and, in some ways, leaving her former life behind. And her children represent the push-pull between those worlds.” During one of Midge’s first standup sets, she asks, “What if I wasn’t supposed to be a mother? What if I picked the wrong profession?” She wonders, to the smoky crowd, whether she’d be able to pick her kids out of a lineup. By season three, we certainly can’t. “I’m not saying it’s the healthiest environment for children to grow up in, but the mumshaming of a fictional character really caught me by surprise. And if I’m feeling this protectiveness over a fictional character, I can’t imagine what mothers go through. I suppose,” she nods grimly, “I’m on a bit of a pre-crusade to try and make sure that we are representing different experiences of motherhood and presenting them as valuable, even if not perfect.”
It was while she was filming the second series of Maisel that she read the script for I’m Your Woman, the 70s thriller she’s promoting today. The film was inspired, said writer-director Julia Hart, by “the moment the door closes in Diane Keaton’s face in The Godfather. I just always found myself wanting to follow the woman… And since I never got to see that in those movies, I decided to make that movie myself.”
Brosnahan plays a bewildered gangster’s moll, forced to go on the run with a stranger’s baby, presented to her by her husband. Though there are shootouts and car chases, the most memorable scenes for me (admittedly deep in the cushioned trenches of maternity leave) were those where Brosnahan’s Jean is in hiding, alone with a baby, oblivious to the violence following them, or moving through the days and nights only half-aware of who she is.
Awake later, feeding my baby at 4am, I started to think about it again, this time less as a crime saga, more as a metaphor for the milky thriller that is single motherhood. Brosnahan choosing to play this role (and produce this film) while Maisel was on hiatus seems like a pointed move. “Ha,” she says. “I hadn’t made that connection until now. But I’m certain, now that you’ve said it, that it was a piece of wanting to tell stories about different kinds of mothers, who may not be the picture perfect mothers of the year. At least not right away.”
After the speed of a character like Midge, she was drawn to something slower, to a character who is, perhaps, closer to Brosnahan herself in their lack of self-confidence. “I see it as a reclaiming of those [gangster] films through a female gaze – an opportunity to explore what happens to those women who normally disappear 20 minutes into the film, and also to have a conversation about mothering that I don’t think I’ve seen before, about trauma and a non-traditional path to motherhood. It’s a film that can hopefully show quiet women that that power was inside them all along.”
Is she a quiet woman? “No. No? I know and love a number of them, but I was surrounded by people who modelled the power of using one’s voice and encouraged me to use mine.” When has that encouragement come in useful? “I struggle answering this question because I don’t necessarily feel like I am that outspoken or political. I’ve been asked where my confidence comes from. But it doesn’t feel like confidence to me. I t doesn’t feel political to speak out about what’s right.”
She has been scandal-adjacent only once in her career – I wonder how Kevin Spacey’s alleged sexual offences impacted her experience on House of Cards, the show that made her. She speaks cautiously, her smile sugar-coating the brittleness. “Well, I was 20 and petrified and isolated from the rest of the cast, so I never came into contact with him. I was overwhelmed all the time. I was consumed by the pressure of trying not to fuck up. I’m a disaster while I’m working, still.” Still? “Yes. I’m an anxious mess. I have serious impostor syndrome. I try to only take roles that feel impossible to grasp – that’s part of the fun and the torture. I went home from Maisel in tears every night, saying, ‘This is the end of my career!’”
Historically, she’s avoided discussing politics, but this year her social media twinkled with pictures of Kamala Harris and links to the Black Lives Matter movement – it’s clear she made the decision to come out as… leftwing. “I tried, this election cycle, to focus on encouraging and empowering people to use their voices, to vote, and was trying to do that in a way that felt less like I was shouting into the void. I mean…” She looks out to the desert, where she spent election night and its unfolding mishigas during a break from shooting in LA. “We’ve had a lot of time to sit with ourselves and decide who we want to be, what we want to do, what we want to fight for.” She is clearly still struggling with how exposed this makes her, especially online, where, she says, she’s told to shut up daily. It is an odd time, she agrees, to become a film star.
ShootingI’m Your Woman just
before the pandemic hit, she found working with a baby good practice for what was to come. “It forces everyone to be firmly planted in the moment. No day ever went as planned. It sounds silly, but spending months on this film was a great exercise. I’ve appreciated the people saying we shouldn’t be trying to accomplish too much now. That gave us a moment to listen to the things that were coming into your head, and doing your best to be kind.” This, too, is something her parents drilled into her. When she mentions them again, she trails off, then holds her hand up to halt my next question. “They’re very private people, they’d murder me if I discussed them!”
In 2018, her father’s sister, the designer Kate Spade, died of suicide. Maisel shut down production while Brosnahan went home to spend time with her family. She’s rarely spoken of it since, except once the following year, when it was announced she would become the new face of Spade’s accessory line. “She found joy in every corner of her life and work,” Brosnahan said, “and that’s something I will always carry with me.”
Joy. It comes up a lot in a conversation with Brosnahan, sometimes in a yearning, nostalgic way, and sometimes in little bursts of celebration. “I love hearing how many people have found Maisel helpful,” she says. “How it brings them out of this time. I find it really…” She searches for the word, “hopeful to be playing a character that leads with joy, even if it’s sometimes naive. It’s good for me, too. You can’t lie in this business, so it’s a genuine search.” A search for joy, yes, and a search for laughs, which Brosnahan admits to needing help with. She’s not a comedian, she stresses – she just plays one. “A big part of comedy, I’ve learned, is confidence – saying jokes with conviction and knowing you have something to offer. Luckily Midge’s journey is one of discovery. I can handle being a funny woman who is having an emotional breakdown, rather than simply a comedian.” And a search for balls. “I’ve been inspired by Midge’s lack of apology for her ambition. My biggest wish for the next generation is that women are not brought up to feel sorry for wanting to be great.”
The show has its joy baked in – the costumes are cartoonish-ly fabulous, the dialogue pops like corn, the sets have the jubilant texture of a theme park. Even the feminism is of the feelgood kind. “In Midge’s mind, even though she’s only 26, she’s already fully cooked. Then her life explodes and she learns how to use her voice in a new way.” Her character in I’m Your Woman has a similar, if slightly bloodier, psychological arc. “I love stories about women discovering their powers. We’ve always valued women that came out of the womb ready to take on the world, but for most people it’s a nonlinear journey; a quieter, slower one. I love telling those stories that remind us it’s never too late.”
When she closes her laptop, Brosnahan will take her dogs for a hike in the desert, and perhaps later watch an episode of Alone, where contestants’ reasons for going home are variously, fear of wolves, fear of bears and fear of storm. “You know what it’s really taught me?” she smiles, looking straight into the screen. “That even when you’re scared, it’s always possible to find a way forward.”
I’m Your Woman is on Amazon Prime from 11 December