Tag: dan palladino

This post contains spoilers for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s series finale. 

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Lenny Bruce has always been dreamy. Sprinkled like pixie dust across 16 episodes of the show’s five seasons, Luke Kirby transformed the real-life comedian into an irresistibly tortured “fairy godmother” of stand-up to Rachel Brosnahan’s Midge. 

Scenes between the pair, crackling with chemistry, hold that same dreamlike quality—their interactions existing in a bubble outside of reality. But in the series finale, when Susie Myerson (Alex Borstein) encounters a rambling, rumpled Lenny Bruce at a San Francisco comedy club in 1965, that bubble is beyond punctured. And for the first time since playing Bruce, Kirby was meant to bomb. “It was a little alarming to suddenly be met with silence and coughs, but I felt like it was definitely appropriate,” Kirby tells Vanity Fair. “As much fun as it’s been to exhibit this man for all of his charm and magnetism, and for somebody who aligned himself so much with an idea around truth, there is another truth that we had to address.”

Kirby brings some of Lenny’s disarming mysticism to a Zoom call about the show’s final season. Petting Big Homer, the curly-haired dog that sits atop his lap, the actor apologizes for his “screwy” internet connection and admits he’s still carrying Lenny inside him. “He’s still lingering around, swirling,” Kirby says wistfully. “He’s been such a good friend to me that I don’t really feel like I have to abandon him. It’s sad, scary to say goodbye to something that does feel so destined to be.”

Destiny is also top of mind in Midge and Lenny’s final scene. Huddled together in the booth of a Chinese restaurant following their snowed-in tryst from the season four finale, she tries to master the art of an indecipherable autograph as he reads her a gushing fortune cookie message. “You mark my words: Very soon, in the not-too-distant future, you will be paying for the Chinese food,” he says with reverent certainty. She’ll go on to perform a star-making set on the fictional Gordon Ford Show, and he’ll succumb further to the personal demons and substance abuse that have slowly begun to bleed into the Maisel universe. 

But the series was never going to depict Lenny’s death on screen, cocreators Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino told Vanity Fair. As Kirby says, “They never wanted to veer into anything that could be interpreted as ghoulish or just making a big thing out of something that really maybe wouldn’t feel earned in the context of the show we’ve made,” adding, “I totally appreciated that and agreed with it. But when I saw what they did, I thought it was really quite beautiful. It, to me, closed the ring on the story of Midge and Lenny.”

That aforementioned Chinese restaurant scene was the last Kirby filmed on the series, and although the day was “really sad,” it also brought joy. “In one of [Lenny’s] last interviews, there was a recording where he was asked: ‘Why do you do it?’ And he said, ‘Because it’s fun.’ The way he says it is so sincere,” Kirby explains. “I tried to abide by that idea on this job.”

Kirby’s performance on Maisel has earned him an Emmy for guest actor in a comedy series and a seal of approval from Kitty Bruce—Lenny’s daughter, who gets special acknowledgement in the finale’s credits. “When I was starting to do the research, it felt clear to me that he wasn’t pursuing a career that was designed to stir up trouble, or wreak havoc on the zeitgeist,” the actor says. “He was really somebody who wanted to do comedy, but for whatever reason, his way of being was problematic for certain institutions. Those institutions made it their mission to, if not destroy him, certainly hurt his reputation and his livelihood. And he had to meet that face-on.”

These days, Kirby is reflective about Lenny’s tenderness, as well as his tenacity. “I do keep coming back to a couple things he said around what it is to be a person. He is the man who said, ‘There are never enough I love yous.’ He’s the man who said, ‘I damn the people who would keep the lovers apart,’” Kirby recalls. “For all of his irreverent comedy and stuff he got in trouble for, to me, it feels like it was rooted in a real love for being alive and for people.”

In Maisel’s fifth and final season, Lenny appears just twice: in the finale and in the premiere, where Midge runs into an especially disheveled-looking version of the comic at JFK. She vows to not “blow it” with her big break. “I’m gonna hold you to that,” Lenny replies. 

This post contains spoilers for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s series finale. 

The four words that gave The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel its name weren’t uttered until the final act of the series finale. Bestowed upon Rachel Brosnahan’s Midge Maisel by Gordon Ford (Reid Scott) after a star-making set on his late-night TV show, the moniker became a symbol of an Upper West Side housewife choosing to become something more.

“Midge bought into an immature fantasy as a young woman, of house and husband and children and postcards and the right bench and temple and the brisket and ‘the rabbi’s coming, the rabbi is coming.’ That was the be-all, end-all for her,” cocreator Amy Sherman-Palladino told Vanity Fair. “And when she discovered this burning ambition in herself, something she didn’t even know was there, she followed it to the very end.”

Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, both real-life and creative partners, are well attuned to the power a show’s final season holds. The pair couldn’t end Gilmore Girls, the beloved series they created and shepherded for six seasons before exiting amidst behind-the-scenes drama, on their own terms. (Netflix’s 2016 revival series allowed them something of a do-over.) When I spoke to the pair, Succession had just killed off Logan Roy—though they practically put their fingers in their ears to resist spoilers. The weekly unfurling of Maisel’s final act caused its own brand of stress: “Every week I’ve got to up the Prozac,” Sherman-Palladino said. “Up the dosage, up the dosage, baby.”

The Palladinos, who spoke to VF prior to the ongoing writers strike, talked about ending Maisel in a tight five—from tackling Lenny Bruce’s death to dreaming up Midge’s star-studded future.

Vanity Fair: Much of the season is framed with flash-forwards into Midge’s fame and the ramifications it had on her children. How did you pick which snippets we’d see?

Daniel Palladino: It was an idea that we had flirted with since season two. We tried something too early, so we felt like we should save it for the last season. Picking and choosing them was just really trial and error. We didn’t want to overdo it, except in episode six, “The Testi-Roastial,” where we did flashbacks within flashbacks.

Amy Sherman-Palladino: We had so much story to get into this season because we needed to wrap everybody up. It really became, what is the big punch? Because you could think of a bunch of funny flash-forwards that would be entertaining to watch—but what is the story punch? That automatically weeded a few things out. And then a couple got weeded out by the fact that we just did not have enough days. We tried to control time, and they wouldn’t let us do that.

Palladino: In a nine-episode season, we tend to come up with 11 episodes of stuff, and then we try to pound them into [the allotted number] or we start eliminating. It’s inevitable.

How much of Midge’s future that we don’t see have you filled in for yourselves? I’m assuming you know the identities of all her husbands.

Sherman-Palladino: We know who the husbands were. 

Palladino: Approximately. We were strongly implying that Robert Evans was one of her husbands. We implied that Quincy Jones cheated on Peggy Lipton at some point, but it’s fiction—

Sherman-Palladino: We didn’t say marriage. He didn’t put a ring on it.

Palladino: One of the things we were flirting with was seeing her with her husband later in life, and that was on the board until the very, very last second.

Sherman-Palladino: We wanted to show Midge and Joel much later in life—that they both have significant others off in the background, but they were only concerned about each other, and just wanted to hang with each other. They were always going to be this couple, whether or not they were with other people. That was the one sequence we couldn’t figure out how to fit into the schedule. It was just too many days and locations. But we put the picture [of the two of them] in the last episode, and the picture basically did the same thing. The man who’s on her vanity table that she says goodnight to every night is the man that she couldn’t be with. So sometimes, those things become happy accidents.