Even though she ended her tenure on Amazon Prime Video in 2023 and, yes, is a fictional character, Miriam “Midge” Maisel, the protagonist of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, is a New York City icon.
At this point, she’s as synonymous with the five boroughs as the yellow taxi, the black-and-white cookie, the tarnished copper tones of the Statue of Liberty. Well, maybe something a little less iconic, closer to Katz’s Delicatessen and the TKTS Booth in Times Square.
The point is that Rachel Brosnahan, who was born in the Midwest but now calls the Upper West Side her home, turned Midge into that icon. Yes, the show’s creators, Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, conjured her, but Brosnahan brought the housewife with standup comedy aspirations to magical life. She made her one of the most indelible female characters on television since, hmm, the beginning of television. The portrayal earned Brosnahan, 34, an Emmy nomination for each of the show’s five seasons. (She won for the first.)
“Even though it’s been a few years since I’ve played her, she still feels very present. She’s still with me,” says Brosnahan. “You take a little piece of every character you play with you, whether consciously or subconsciously.”
It will certainly be fun to see if any of Midge’s mannerisms show up in Brosnahan’s latest and biggest project to date. This July, she plays yet another bold and nervy fast-talking dame. If Mrs. Maisel is “local famous,” her latest character is recognized worldwide. And this one was already iconic before she got to it; Brosnahan is playing Lois Lane in the latest big-screen incarnation of Superman, directed by James Gunn. The character first appeared in comic book form 87 years ago, in 1938’s Action Comics #1, as a journalist for The Daily Planet and the longtime love interest and comic foil for Clark Kent, aka Superman. She’s appeared since then in multiple films, animated shows and television series.
“I didn’t grow up reading comics, but I was particularly drawn to fantasy and people with powers when I was a kid,” recalls Brosnahan, citing The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter books and the lesser-known Daughters of the Moon series, about five ordinary teenagers in Los Angeles who happen to have supernatural abilities.
They may not be superheroes, but “the draw is similar. They’re aspirational,” says Brosnahan. “They show us the power of courage and empathy. They give us hope that good will always win and that so often superheroes aren’t the only powerful ones.” Regular people can be, too.
“As a young woman, you’re always looking for role models,” she continues. “I knew about Lois Lane. My dad grew up on the Margot Kidder version. You’re desperate to find characters who have all the things that you want to be.”
The Milwaukee native also happened to be a fan of Gunn, the writer-director who shepherded Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy and DC’s The Suicide Squad to the screen and is now a co-CEO of DC Studios. This summer’s Superman is meant to begin a new era of DC films and re-jumpstart the universe.
It was with all this in the background—not to mention performing in a three-hour stage version of Lorraine Hansberry’s rarely produced The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window opposite Oscar Isaac at the time—that Brosnahan recorded an audition to be Lois Lane in her apartment.
“We made it in the living room, a little bit too late at night. My husband, Jason”—the actor Jason Ralph—“played Superman.”
Gunn was impressed enough by the self-tape to bring Brosnahan out to California for a “chemistry read” with three aspiring Clark Kents, alongside two other actresses vying for the role of Lois. It was what Brosnahan calls a “good old-fashioned mix-and-match. It was a wild experience. We were all dressed the same.”
“It was living the dream to take a play like [Sidney Brustein] to Broadway and then to drop in, quite literally, to a completely different universe,” she says. “It was one of those moments. There was something magical about getting on a plane after a performance, trying to get to L.A. on no sleep.”
Brosnahan didn’t approach the audition as a competition. “I learned a long time ago that you’re not reading against someone,” she says. “You’re seeing whether it’s not you or it’s you.”
“Obviously,” she wanted the part, she says, but Brosnahan saw it as a “fun day on a studio lot. We don’t get to do so much in person anymore, which is so much what this art form is about. At the risk of sounding like a total nerd, it was a joyful experience of what I love about performing, which is being surrounded by other people who love it, too.”
Just before she left to go back to New York, she met the man who would become her Superman: David Corenswet, a Juilliard graduate perhaps best known for a role in Ryan Murphy’s The Politician on Netflix.
“We said, ‘Hey, how are you?’ and then we read together once, and we did one take. It was over, and it was such a whirlwind. You don’t really have time to think about it,” says Brosnahan. “Neither one of us really remember. We kinda blacked out.”
Recalls Corenswet: “We shook hands, said hello, sat down, bickered for ten pages, got up, said goodbye, and the rest is history.”
“In the screen test, her chemistry with David was off the charts,” says Gunn, who also got a glowing recommendation from Mrs. Maisel co-creator Sherman-Palladino “singing [Rachel’s] praises like no one has ever done before.”
Brosnahan, Gunn adds, “has a wit and an incessant drive about her that is 100 percent Lois Lane. Working with her is a Q&A session every day. She has tons of questions about how I see every little moment in the movie, every line and action. Honestly, I love it. She cares about Lois and the film as much as I do.”
To that end, Brosnahan says she did “a lot of research” in preparation for the role. “I spoke to a couple of investigative journalists to find out what makes them tick. It really helped.” (It also helped with a separate project of her own. More on that later.)
Many actresses have played Lois before, most recently Amy Adams. Brosnahan says she admires the character because “she’s brilliant, she’s courageous, she’s relentless and determined and she feels motivated by the word ‘No.’” Though Brosnahan insists Lois and Midge Maisel have almost nothing in common, “They’re both bold characters who are being pushed to their limits in different ways.”
Most of Brosnahan’s work on the film involved “practical” shooting—that is, on real sets with real people. During her first two days of shooting, she and Corenswet shot a 10-page scene in an apartment. “It felt like it could have been an indie movie,” she says.
That’s the kind of acting Brosnahan is used to.
But Superman isn’t an indie movie. It’s a huge summer blockbuster with a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars, featuring mondo special effects. “It was and wasn’t what I expected,” she says. “It was so fun.”
For the first time, Brosnahan played against an invisible canine, Superman’s dog Krypto, as space constraints made it impossible for Jolene, the dog’s stand-in, to be in the shot. Same goes for an adult actor who did a lot of the animals’ motion-capture work. They couldn’t even fit in a tennis ball for her to work with.
“I had to do it in thin air,” Brosnahan says. “I’m not a great mime. I’ve never felt like a worse actor. At least James told me it hasn’t been cut.”
Brosnahan also gets to fly with Superman, of course. “We did an air ballet,” she says. “I had a blast.” When they filmed the scenes, Corenswet had already been flying for many months, so she had a good guide and companion.
“David just is Superman,” Brosnahan says. In those scenes, Lois is particularly distracted from being airborne “by the handsome gentleman in front of her.” The same might be said for Brosnahan. “I don’t know that I was so focused on the flying,” she says. “Still, the hardest part is getting the feet to look right. When in doubt, point your toes.”
Corenswet lauds Brosnahan’s “many talents” that far exceed pointing toes. “Her incisive inquisitiveness is a great gift to the character and also to her scene partners. So is her facility with language and her appreciation of a good argument.”
The actor admits that “similes are not my strong suit,” but he compares working with Brosnahan to “standing in the shallows of a river.” “It’s refreshing and invigorating,” Corenswet says, “and those tiny fish come up and bite your feet, and you think, This kind of hurts, but I’m definitely enjoying it.”
Her next stop before the film’s release: crossing many a major body of water as part of a massive global press tour. Brosnahan expects it will be “pretty fast and furious. We’re going all over the place.” Is she ready? “Is anyone ever ready?” she asks. “Talk to me on the other side. It’s about making sure you have enough clothes and snacks. If you’re hungry, you’re grumpy.” (She likes trail mix and Luna LemonZest bars.)
Is she prepared for all the outfit changes for premieres, press conferences and photo calls? “I play dress-up for a living, so I love it,” she says. Don’t expect a full-on Margot Robbie-as-Barbie style transformation from Brosnahan on the red carpet. “I love a little nod, though,” she says. “We’re looking for ways to pay homage to the universe. We might be the only ones who know.”
Since wrapping Superman, Brosnahan has filmed an adaptation of King Lear called Lear Rex. She’ll star in (and executive produce) the second season of the David E. Kelley anthology series Presumed Innocent on Apple TV+. She’s developing films with her producing team in which she may or may not star. She’s also been trying her hand at directing—on a nonfiction project she’s not yet ready to really discuss.
“I’ve always loved the medium,” she says, citing a documentary film class she took at NYU that turned her into “an obsessive viewer of documentaries.” This is where interviewing investigative journalists for her Lois Lane preparation came in handy.
Brosnahan won’t say much about the new work, but she will say that the process has forced her to “focus on the moment” and “be present.” “That’s enlightening for me as someone who is often looking around corners,” she says, looking for the next role, the next gig.
In the early days of her career, when she broke out on House of Cards, “so much was happening so fast, and I was so concerned about what was going to happen next,” she admits. Then Mrs. Maisel took off like a jumbo jet. “Now I’m just in a moment of wanting to feel two feet on the ground and really experience all of it.”
“If we’re lucky, we’re allowed to have eras,” Brosnahan says, adding, with a wink, “as Taylor Swift has shown us, at least. You can’t be an artist if you’re not having new experiences. And I want to be present for them.”
So, what era is Brosnahan in now that she’s embarking on the path to global stardom and recognition?
“I probably won’t know until it’s over,” she says. “Ask me again in a few years.”
Hair: Clay Nielsen
Makeup: William Scott Using Dior Forever Skin Perfect
Manicure: Gina Eppolito-Cohen
Photo Assistants: Milos Janjusevic, Ross Thomas
Styling Assistant: Kyle Gleason
Production Assistant: Emerson Scheerer
Tailor: Morgan Foote
Shot at the Manhattan Suite at the Park Hyatt New York
