Mrs marvel
The Emmy-winning actress returns as the housewife-turned-comic in the hit series
How Rachel Brosnahan plans to bring back the cracking humour and feminism in the Emmy-winning show ‘The Marvelous Mrs Maisel’ as it returns for season two
It is a bright, windy day in Paris and a maze of cordoned-off streets beside the Seine have been hauled back into the 1950s. Frank Sinatra’s I’ve Got the World on a String blares from the speakers, soundtracking the movements of a very well-behaved donkey, as a crowd of extras pretend to shop. Around them stands the kind of crew you would expect to find on a generously budgeted film. But this is the set of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, Amazon’s stealth-hit comedy about the adventures of a well-to-do Jewish housewife turned outrageous stand-up comedian.
Even in this golden age of TV there aren’t many productions that would be given the green light to film a handful of scenes halfway across the globe, apparently just for the hell of it (after a day on set, it is still not clear why the series needed to temporarily relocate from New York to the French capital). But Mrs
Maisel is a triumph of the streaming era. At this year’s Emmys, it took home a staggering seven awards, cementing the reputation of its showrunner, Gilmore
Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino, and minting a new star in Rachel Brosnahan, the woman responsible for bringing Miriam ‘Midge’ Maisel to life.
A few months after the filming in Paris has ended, Brosnahan is sitting in a London hotel suite, a vision of polished perkiness with perfectly set waves, a prim floral dress and a tendency to laugh breathlessly after most responses. The 27-year-old is unfailingly polite and fastidiously positive, expressing wild enthusiasm over everything from Enid Blyton books to her high-school drama teachers.
This chirpiness is something Brosnahan has in common with her character — Midge Maisel doesn’t resemble a human woman so much as a walking, talking blizzard of can-do attitude. When we first meet her, she is the platonic ideal of a dutiful mid-20th-century housewife, living up to the standards of the patriarchy with joyful dedication, sneaking out of bed in the early hours to do her make-up so she can trick her husband into thinking she woke up like this. Even after that husband, Joel, turns her life into a cliche by leaving her for his secretary, she reshapes her misfortune into a fulfilling new career as a stand-up comedian, cracking jokes about sex and gender double standards with staggering self-confidence and charisma.
Brosnahan seems a little more cowed by authority than her 1950s alter ego — she is extremely worried, for example, about being “yelled at” if she gives away any spoilers for Mrs Maisel’s second series — but the pair share a buoyant optimism that feels like the most American thing on the planet.
Perhaps this is why it is a surprise to discover that Brosnahan is actually half-British. Her mother grew up in Leeds and her parents met at university in Brighton. Despite the couple settling near Chicago, the young Brosnahan spent most summers in the UK. It was a childhood shaped by her parents’ toughlove approach to their daughter’s acting ambitions.
“They were extremely supportive and encouraging, but by saying: ‘We’re not going to help you with that.’ Like if I wanted to take a class, my dad would say: ‘OK, well, you should get babysitting so you can pay for that class, and you should take classes because you need to get better at this.’”
It’s a tactic that seemed to pay off quickly: at 17, Brosnahan was acting professionally after scoring a part in the Gary Oldman horror The Unborn. But her breakthrough role — for which she received her first Emmy nomination — came in 2013, when she began playing former sex worker Rachel Posner in House of Cards.
It is on that topic that Brosnahan’s uber-jolly persona begins to falter. Her face drops when I ask whether she is upset about the way the Kevin Spacey scandal has sullied the legacy of House of Cards.
“We never had a scene together. I’d been off the show for a couple of years,” she says, a fact that apparently bears repeating. “I’ve been off the show for quite a while now, since season three,” she explains very slowly, furrowing her eyebrows until she locates a positive angle on this unsavoury topic: the fact that Netflix commissioned a final series to tie up loose ends. “There are so many hard-working, talented, generous people who work on that show who have poured their hearts and souls into it, so I’m thrilled that they got to finish the story the way that they wanted to.”
For somebody so deeply involved with politics — at the time of our interview, her Instagram page is swarming with calls to her fans in the US to vote in the midterm elections — Brosnahan is very coy about expressing any political views, and can’t even bring herself to say who she votes for (although she heavily implies her loyalties lie with the Democrats).
Brosnahan’s reluctance to express even the mildest of political views — and determination to dodge absolutes — is mirrored in the show in which she stars. In fact, one of the most intriguing and pleasingly nuanced aspects of The
Marvelous Mrs Maisel is that it presents a highly ambivalent portrait of female empowerment. There is no feminism with a capital F in Midge’s universe. “This performance of woman and housewife is something that makes her feel good, it’s very genuine for her,” she explains, echoing the show’s refusal to judge her for taking pleasure in cleaving to society’s demands.
Maisel might be a proto-Joan Rivers in terms of her comedy — mining laughs from the double standards faced by men and women — but it was important to the show’s makers that this was an organic response to her life experiences (namely, her husband rejecting her) rather than anything dogmatic. That might feel both anachronistic and out of step with this cosily privileged and rather self-obsessed character. “She’s not thinking about any of this in a political context — she’s only thinking about it as it applies to her,” Brosnahan explains.
It might not be a box-ticking assemblage of progressive values, but what makes The Marvelous Mrs Maisel feel straightforwardly refreshing and progressive is that it portrays a multidimensional, contradictory and selfsteering female character. It is worth remembering just how rare this remains: Brosnahan admits to being desperate to win the part after becoming frustrated by the one-dimensional characters she is asked to audition for. “I feel like I’ve read the same part in 1,200 scripts someone’s girlfriend who is pretty but doesn’t know it. There’s not one thing that makes a woman strong or vulnerable or any kind of word you could use to describe her. It’s complicated and we should show that.”
Thanks to the slippery feminism of
The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, Brosnahan has already ensured she is part of a giant leap in that direction.
“This performance of woman and housewife is something that makes her feel good.” RACHEL BROSNAHAN | Actress