Photography by Joel Barhamand
PAST
Rachel Brosnahan has starred in Othello on the New York City stage (as Desdemona, opposite David Oyelowo and Daniel Craig, in last year’s revival), but you likely know her as another woman who was lusted after, scorned by, and ultimately killed at the hands of men: the call girl Rachel Posner on Netflix’s House of Cards. The cheerful 26-year-old Wisconsin native netted an Emmy nomination for that bleak performance, but she was thankful to move on. “Rachel was so against-type for me,” she says. “I didn’t have to work very hard to move away from her.” Nor from the dozens of other one-dimensional roles she was subsequently offered: “Women are often objectified in scripts or play some sexualized trope. I made an active decision to never entertain a script that has a women introduced having sex. We don’t need any more of that.”
PRESENT
Based on her latest project, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, there’s no doubt that Brosnahan has upheld her vow. In the Amazon original series, created by Gilmore Girls’ Amy Sherman-Palladino and starting this month, she plays a bored, brassy housewife named Midge, who tries her hand at stand-up comedy after her marriage falls apart. “Midge is the most confident character I’ve ever played,” she says. “I rarely read scripts with confident women in them. I’m lucky not to struggle with self-confidence, personally, but still, playing a woman who’s unshakably confident was new and difficult and thrilling.” However, even the self-assured Brosnahan found herself nauseated at the prospect of having to do a routine. “Comedy is freaking hard, man,” she says. “Midge and I had to learn stand-up together, but I was horrified every single minute.”
FUTURE
Amazon recently picked up Mrs. Maisel for a second season, but before going back to filming, Brosnahan is set to executive produce for the first time with Femme, a short film about the gay dating scene in New York City that she’s hoping to release by the end of the year. “It focuses mainly on this idea of performing gender,” she says. “Coming off of my work on Mrs. Maisel really attracted me to this theme.” When asked about the future for her own gender in a rapidly changing Hollywood, she’s optimistic, thanks to her experience with Sherman-Palladino. “We need more women like her writing and directing,” Brosnahan says. “That’s how you fully flesh out female characters and change how Hollywood views women. Maisel is created by, written by, produced by, edited by, even associate directed by women. We have women all over this show.”
