For Brosnahan, Emmy win is still sinking in
Soft-spoken in person, actress revels in her role as confident Mrs. Maisel
In the end, a piece of dental floss saved the day.
Rachel Brosnahan’s otherwise perfect night at the Emmy Awards — which included not only a trophy for best actress in a comedy for Amazon’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” but also a win for comedy series, among others — had one tiny flaw. There was the little matter of the diamond ring she couldn’t get off her hand.
Hours earlier, in her rush to get dressed, she tried on the “beautiful, beautiful” ring. But then she wanted to switch it to another finger — and it wouldn’t budge. “And then you know when you start pulling on something, it just gets swollen,” she recounts the next morning over a late breakfast in her hotel room in West Hollywood. “So I was on the red carpet minorly panicking about this ring that was very stuck on my finger.”
It wasn’t until she got home in the wee hours that she was able to do a bit of research on YouTube, and learned about the dental floss and olive oil trick. After a little threading and a lot of slathering, the offending bauble finally slid off her finger. “So much for a perfect night,” she adds with a laugh.
The awards show had barely begun when it was clear the momentum was all in “Maisel’s” favor. First, Alex Borstein won for best supporting actress; then the show’s creator and executive producer, Amy Sherman-Palladino, made history as the first woman to win for both writing and directing in the same year. The next thing Brosnahan knew, Angela Bassett was announcing her name (if butchering it a bit). “I was completely overwhelmed,” says Brosnahan.
She didn’t prepare a speech, she says, but after what she laughingly recalls as the “Oprah debacle” at the Golden Globes — she’d interrupted herself mid-acceptance with a shoutout to Oprah Winfrey — she cobbled together in her head a list of people to thank. But what she really wanted to do was speak to the moment.
“One of the things I love the most about this show … (is) it’s about a woman who is finding her voice anew,” she said from the stage. “It’s something that’s happening all over the country right now. One of the most important ways that we can find and use our voices is to vote.”
“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” which will debut its second season later this year, won five prizes that night and eight trophies overall out of 14 nominations. The TV academy clearly fell in love with the tale of Midge Maisel, a 1950s New York City housewife whose fairy-tale life gets upended when her husband walks out, leading her to discover a talent for stand-up comedy.
The morning after the Emmys, Brosnahan is slightly dazed. Despite the trophy sitting on the bed, the win hasn’t sunk in.
“I’ll never recover from having my name spoken in the same sentence as the other legendary actresses in this categories who I’ve admired,” she says of her fellow nominees, including Pamela Adlon, Allison Janney, Issa Rae, Tracee Ellis Ross and Lily Tomlin.
The show is something of an acting Olympics — not only must she master that rat-a-tat Sherman-Palladino dialogue, but she also has to deliver it from the stages of comedy clubs as Midge makes the rounds honing her routine.
In person, the 27-year-old actress is nothing like the bold, outspoken Midge — her quiet demeanor is punctuated by soft, self-conscious giggles. “I’m not as confident as Midge, particularly when it comes to work. Midge enters into this whole new field that she has no experience in at all, and genuinely believes in her heart of hearts that she can take it by storm. She never doubts it for a single second. That’s not me.”
Summoning up that bravado is somewhat of a leap for her, she readily acknowledges. It starts with “power posing” in her mirror — and then segues to what she says the show’s first assistant director calls “siren songs.” “I don’t know how you’d ever print this,” she says, letting out an over-the-top “Ahhhhh!”
Two seasons in (with a third already ordered), Brosnahan admits she’s still intimidated.
“I knew that Midge would become a successful stand-up, but I didn’t really think about what that would look like in practice,” she says. “It never gets less horrifying..”
“The secret of Rachel’s success is good old-fashioned talent and extreme hard work. No one works harder on her craft, on her character,” says Sherman-Palladino. “She’s a total and utter perfectionist, but in the nicest possible way. It’s that fearlessness, that confidence, that strength, that ability to commit everything to a scene, that brings Midge alive. Plus, no one can take off some gloves, a coat and a purse faster or with more precision. That may not sound like much, but in our show — it’s a lifesaver.”
Although Brosnahan was shy as a kid growing up in suburban Illinois, she says she always wanted to be an actress. She landed the part of the enigmatic Rachel Posner in Netflix’s “House of Cards,” and turned what was planned to be a five-line role into a recurring character.
The series’ then-showrunner Beau Willimon says Brosnahan’s performance “leapt off the screen” so much that the writers expanded her story. “The more we worked with Rachel, the more obvious it became that she had a long and successful career ahead of her,” he says.
Brosnahan remains grateful for the opportunity the show provided. “ That was challenging because it required digging into emotional depths that I’d never traveled to before and trying to hold my own with such powerhouses around me,” she says.
After Brosnahan starred in the WGN America drama series “Manhattan,” the script for “Maisel” landed in her lap.
“I fell in love with it from the first page,” she says. “Midge reminded me of so many women that I know and love in my own life that I don’t see on-screen enough — unapologetically confident, ambitious women who approach the world with a sense of insatiable curiosity and joy. She’s complicated too. She’s privileged and selfish and has a hard time seeing outside her previously very narrow worldview. But she’s interested in growing and evolving. And that’s exciting to me as well.”