As she wraps up her six-year stint as the most adorable rebel the small screen has ever seen, Rachel Brosnahan is determined to cut just as iconoclastic a figure in real life Hollywood.
Less than 15 minutes into a coffee date at the Hungarian Pastry Shop in Morningside Heights in Manhattan, Rachel Brosnahan is spotted. “Is your name Rachel?” asks the waitress bringing her an apple strudel.
“Yes,” Brosnahan says. She says it softly, a little uneasily, so different from Midge, the brash character she has played to much acclaim on Prime Video’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel for four seasons. Outside of her constricting costumes, Brosnahan looks different, too—more demure. Today her light brown hair is swept back, and she’s wearing jeans and an oversize beige blazer. “Oh my god, I love your show,” says the waitress, who introduces herself as Jess.
She used to say no when people asked her if she was Rachel Brosnahan or if they knew her from somewhere, until a friend told her she was trying too hard to be unassuming and that it came off as rude. Now she says yes and thank you. New York is a city where Brosnahan feels she can lie low, and the masks of the pandemic helped her have an extra layer of anonymity. Since public life has returned, she feels flattered to be recognized, but it’s awkward. “I became an actor because I didn’t want to be myself all the time,” she says. “Being yourself takes a lot of hard work.”
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has been a phenomenon since it debuted in 2017. It’s hilarious and nostalgic, the costumes are eye candy, and the ensemble cast has the kind of zany chemistry that is hard to create. But the core of the show, and the reason for Maisel mania, is Midge, who is complicated, opinionated, and ambitious in a time when women still had to get their husbands’ signatures for credit cards or leases. And Brosnahan has given the character the special sauce that allows her to be all of those things—multidimensional, demanding, difficult—and also supremely sympathetic and entertaining.
Brosnahan has had six years of being Midge. “She’s so unapologetic and confident,” she says of the character that made her recognizable. But the show that won Brosnahan both Emmy and Golden Globe awards is coming to a close—she’s currently filming the final season—and now its star is grappling with what’s next.
She could easily score talky roles like Midge, playing iterations of smart girls in comedies for the rest of her days. She would be great at it. But instead Brosnahan, 32, has decided to step out of the gilded cage of prestige comedy to do something unexpected: a western, set in 1897, called Dead for a Dollar. The film co-stars Christoph Waltz and Willem Dafoe and is directed by Walter Hill, who is known for being a master of the western and action genres (Deadwood, 48 Hours, The Warriors). Its premiere at the Venice Film Festival garnered a healthy dose of buzz.
Brosnahan plays the allegedly kidnapped wife (also named Rachel) of a rich man who is being trailed by a bounty hunter (Waltz) and a horse thief (Dafoe). It’s a part that has shades of Old Hollywood, in that she gets to wear gauzy nightgowns and slap people and say things like, “I’ve always resisted traditional morality.” It’s a stark movie, one in which the themes of independence and trust resonate particularly strongly right now. Brosnahan is so good she’ll likely add some new trophies to her collection.
“I had to get curious about the west and that moment in time, and learn to shoot and ride and use a parasol,” she says. “A western was something I’ve never done, and a type of role that hasn’t been offered to me before. I wouldn’t have thought I was hungry for it, but it was in fact what I was looking for.”
The film was shot on a ranch in New Mexico, about 30 minutes from Santa Fe, a city she fell for eight years ago, when she was filming the TV series Manhattan, in which she played the young wife of a physicist involved in the development of the atomic bomb. Now she and her husband, the actor Jason Ralph, try to go every year. (Pro tip: She recommends the spa Ten Thousand Waves on the edge of town for hot springs and Japanese fusion food.)
She and Ralph have been together since 2013, when she was 23. They met while filming an indie movie called I’m Obsessed with You, which is about a group of college friends, and all the actors lived in a dorm together. She was so committed to her role that she wouldn’t date him until after filming. “It was a hard no for me.” She adds theatrically: “Stay away, stay away. Okay, fine.”
Now she and Ralph and their dogs live in Manhattan, close to where Maisel is set yet not exactly the fictional New York midcentury escapist world of classic-six apartments and fast-talking, loving but dysfunctional upper-middle-class Jewish families that Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband Daniel Palladino created for the show.
Maisel was her first comedic role, and a visit to soundstage 30 at Steiner Studios in Brooklyn reveals an actress who is impressively focused while working. I watched Brosnahan do a scene set at the Queens home of Moishe and Shirley Maisel, Midge’s former in-laws, played by Kevin Pollak and Caroline Aaron; the scene also featured Marin Hinkle, who plays Midge’s mother, and Midge’s two children, Esther and Ethan. The child actors who played them were restless as they filmed take after take; I lost count at 13. In the maybe 90 minutes of rat-a-tat dialogue, I saw Brosnahan flub a line only once.
Remarkable also was how much Brosnahan played team captain on set, teaching the kids the sign language alphabet between takes, or asking, “Can you draw me a big pony with six heads?” Hinkle said that once, after a particularly grueling run toward the end of a season, Brosnahan arranged for someone to bring piglets to the set.
“She’s a mother hen. She’s the best with the little ones, and us, too, making sure everyone is having a good day,” Pollak says. “You know that saying, ‘The fish stinks from the head’? In this case the fish smells beautiful.” As someone who started his career in standup, Pollak has put some thought into Brosnahan’s own evolution toward playing a credible comic. “What makes her so flawless is she’s treating standup like a dramatic piece, making it real and not trying to make it funny. That great dramatic work is why she’s so great on the show.”
Brosnahan is around the same age as Midge, both about 25 when the series started and in their early thirties now. The actress is a product of the Midwest, born in Milwaukee and raised in Highland Park, near Chicago. (Her father worked in children’s book publishing; her British mom raised Brosnahan and her brother and sister.) She wrestled, snowboarded, and played lacrosse, and started acting in school plays while in kindergarten. When she got into the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU for college, she enrolled.
She landed small roles on TV shows like The Good Wife and Gossip Girl, but her success didn’t come immediately. She worked at a downtown restaurant called L’Express, which had a colorful clientele. “This dominatrix would come in after midnight on Thursdays or something. We had one table that was always reserved for her, and she’d order the escargots,” Brosnahan recalls. She roomed with two friends in Chelsea in a two-bedroom that they jerry-rigged into three. In 2009 she auditioned for Gus Van Sant’s Restless, a role she wanted so badly that she flew to L.A. at her own expense—money she definitely didn’t have—and didn’t get it. A picture from that trip is the very first photo on her phone. She finds it. She’s 18 but looks even younger. “I sobbed,” she says, when she learned she hadn’t gotten the part. “All over New York.” She walks around a lot when she’s sad.
At one point she moved to Los Angeles on the advice of a studio executive. “He told me that you can be an actor in New York, but you can only make a living as an actor in L.A. I got scared, so I moved,” she says. “Turns out that’s not true. It was not for me. I’m glad I did it; I’m glad I tried it.”
Arguably her first big break was on House of Cards, the adaptation of a British series directed by David Fincher that gave Netflix its first original TV hit. Her sex worker character Rachel Posner didn’t even have a name initially, just a few lines. “Everyone was like, ‘Whoa.’ Rachel just blew everybody away,” says Michael Kelly, who played creepy henchman Doug Stamper on the show. Their chemistry together prompted the screenwriter Beau Willimon to expand her role into a longer character arc for the second season, and Brosnahan came away with an Emmy nomination. Kelly thinks she could do anything next. “She’s done drama and comedy and a western, so what’s left, an action movie or play a superhero? She has achieved that status in the industry where I truly believe there’s nothing she can’t do with a work ethic and a talent like that.”
If you ask Brosnahan what she wants her career to look like, she mentions Frances McDormand and Emma Thompson. “I admire how versatile they are and how they continue to push themselves and take risks,” she says. “It feels like they never do the same thing twice. I would be thrilled if my career gave me the same opportunity.” Brosnahan is a planner, though; she’s not content to sit back and hope that Maisel was enough to launch her on such a trajectory. And so, like Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington and Jessica Chastain and other actresses who have noticed that producing allows one to circumvent Hollywood’s often stale notions of womanhood, she has started her own company, Scrap Paper Pictures. (“I asked Rachel, ‘If I don’t get a job for a while after Maisel, can I work at your production company?’ ” Hinkle joked.) Through it she has already produced two podcasts, The Miranda Obsession and Listening In, the feature film I’m Your Woman, and two editions of the Amazon original special Yearly Departed.
After watching her on set, I meet up with Brosnahan in a nondescript dressing room, where she’s still in full hair and makeup but wearing a pink robe and eating a spinach salad and some kind of superfood truffles from Provenance, a meal delivery service. For some actors the idea of striving is an insult, but Brosnahan is wholly aware of how hard she tries. “I know it’s mostly used in a derogatory way, but I spent so many years wishing I could claim to be a theater kid,” she says. “I wanted to be in that crew and be a part of that, and I felt like the outsider,” she says.
This self-awareness (achieved with the help of regular therapy and visits with an acting coach) means that she knows what she wants—and what she doesn’t. The past few years have been breakneck, and she’s looking forward to some post-Maisel time to let her mind wander. “I want to be curious again and absorb other artists’ work and go to the museum and travel and become a richer person again,” she says.
It’s a safe bet that she will not meander for long. She is eager, now, for the opportunity to show her range. “I feel like I’ve been told for a long time to pick a lane and stay in it.” Choosing her next parts, she says, is akin to stretching and reaching into corners she hasn’t been in before. It’s scary but enticing. “I’m utterly terrified and worried I’ll have an ulcer,” she says. But also, “I’m addicted to that feeling now.” [Source]
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