The star opens up about Midge’s future with Lenny Bruce and other surprising finale reveals while looking ahead to the Amazon comedy’s fifth and final season: “I appreciate this portrait of an incredibly flawed woman chasing her ambition as hard as she knows how.”
This story contains major spoilers for season four of Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
Fans of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel got a glimpse at a Midge Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) in season four that they haven’t seen since season one: a Midge on the edge.
“We met her when she’d hit rock bottom, drunk and half-naked in the comedy club in the middle of the night,” Rachel Brosnahan tells The Hollywood Reporter of the series’ pilot episode. “In some ways, it was fun to return to a version of Midge that is furious and is wearing every emotion she has on her sleeve all at once.”
The 1960s-set fourth season picks up right where season three left off. Midge has been dropped from Shy Baldwin’s (LeRoy McClain) tour after accidentally outing his sexuality during a comedy set at the Apollo. She’s out of a job, beats up a taxi cab with a palm leaf and stumbles upon an illegal strip club, where she decides to start working as an emcee.
Over the course of the season, Midge stands her ground and is open to new gigs but refuses to take on any jobs opening for other acts. Her manager, Susie Myerson (Alex Borstein), spends the majority of the eight episodes trying to convince Midge to not be so stubborn and reconsider her stance, to no avail.
It isn’t until the finale that Midge has the sense knocked into her by none other than Lenny Bruce (Luke Kirby), who, shortly after they finally have sex, criticizes her decision to turn down a high-profile gig opening for Tony Bennett at the Copacabana and accuses her of committing intentional career sabotage.
“Ninety percent of this game is how they see you. They see you hanging with Tony Bennett, they think you deserve to be there. They see you hauled off to jail for saying ‘fuck’ at a strip club, they think you deserve that also,” Bruce tells Midge after his iconic Carnegie Hall act. “If you blow this, Midge,” he concludes, fighting back tears. “You will break my fucking heart.”
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