Rachel Brosnahan has seen a lot in her 13 years in New York. But it wasn’t until recently that she considered herself a real
New Yorker.

A week before Christmas, Brosnahan, 31, received a call from a friend who had swung by her apartment and discovered an unexpected guest in her bathroom: a deceased, water-logged rat who had climbed up her pipes and drowned in her toilet. Traumatized, Brosnahan and her husband, actor Jason Ralph, rushed home to assess the situation. “We felt like the Ghostbusters walking into that apartment,” Brosnahan says over a Zoom call weeks later. Brosnahan, who decided she would be the one to fish out the rat, went into crisis mode: She put back on her black KN95 mask, slapped on some blue surgical gloves, fashioned a pair of “rat chopsticks” from two wooden sticks and got down to business, as her husband recorded the whole operation for TikTok. Of course, it went viral. “People were so mad at me for not showing the rat,” says Brosnahan, who put a GIF from Pixar’s “Ratatouille” over the real dead rat. “What? It was traumatizing. Nobody wants to see that, and I’m not about to put that on anyone’s For You page.”

While Brosnahan considers exterminating a drowned rat from her toilet as her rite of passage as a New Yorker, many would consider her role as Midge in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”— Amazon’s Emmy-winning comedy series about a fast-talking, uproarious housewife-turned-stand-up-comedian from Manhattan’s Upper West Side—as her official New York badge of pride. “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” which premieres its fourth season on February 18, follows Midge’s career, from her first off-the-cuff standup routine at the Gaslight Cafe in season one to her big break as the opening act for one of America’s most beloved Motown singers (and the fallout that comes next) in season three. While Brosnahan sees some similarities between her and Midge’s careers (“Midge and I both learn by doing”), she admits it took her a lot longer than a couple seasons to become the award-winning actor she is today. “Midge may have had a slightly more overnight success,” she says.
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