The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: Rachel Brosnahan on the Finale, Midge’s Fame, and Susie’s Backstory

Midge has come a long way since she was a broken-hearted housewife who, in the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel premiere six years ago, drunkenly grabbed a mic at a New York comedy club and performed a rogue stand-up set. In a fulfilling creative flourish, series creator Amy Sherman-Palladino ended her Emmy-winning Amazon series by sprinkling flash-forwards through the show’s fifth and final season. Viewers saw where the beloved title character ended up, most satisfyingly in a 60 Minutes highlight reel that rattles off her accomplishments and marriages. In the series finale, “Four Minutes,” we finally learn how Midge gets her major break: by again taking a chance, grabbing a mic, and performing another rogue stand-up act. This time, it’s on The Gordon Ford Show, the late-night talk show on which she’s been working as a writer.

“It feels like the perfect marriage of all the different things that make Midge’s act magical,” Brosnahan tells VF of Midge’s final stand-up set. “She’s asking big questions about her life and the world around her. She’s got a couple jokes in her arsenal, but the rest is by the seat of her pants. She walks out the other side of that set different than she was four minutes prior when she started it. I was very excited to read that final act and see how Amy sent Midge off.”

On a break from her grueling eight-show-a-week Broadway schedule—she’s starring in The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window with Oscar Isaac—Brosnahan jumped on the phone to dissect the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel finale. Among the talking points: Midge and Susie’s love story, the real-life comedians who have complimented her stand-up performance, and the plot twists that shocked her and the cast. 

Vanity Fair: Before reading the season five scripts, did you have any idea what Midge’s future held?

Rachel Brosnahan: We gave up imagining what could come next a long time ago. We gave over completely to the creative genius of Amy Sherman-Palladino and (co-creator) Dan Palladino, because anything that we could come up with was swiftly outdone by anything they came up with. I mean, I always imagined—based on the log line from the original pilot that said Midge went from being an Upper West Side housewife and mother to a comic landing on Johnny Carson’s couch—that we would end up somewhere in that vein.

It was a surprise to get all of these flash-forwards—seeing what Midge’s kids are up to as adults, hearing that Midge went on to marry and divorce Paul Simon and Quincy Jones. What were some of your favorite details about where Midge landed?

Well, the cabbage patch that she literally landed in in Israel [to visit her adult son Ethan]—I couldn’t have seen that coming from a hundred miles away. One of my favorite parts about shooting the season was shooting all the still photos that appear briefly in Midge’s penthouse [in the finale]. I don’t know if you got to look at those—the genius of our production design is that you only see them for about four seconds. But we spent an entire afternoon shooting me to get [photoshopped] in with pictures of Andy Warhol, Carol Burnett, and all, all sorts of greats from the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s.

What surprised you about the script for the series finale?

I was surprised by how she ends up on the [The Gordon Ford Show]. But it feels so in keeping with how she stumbled onto the stage at the Gaslight in the first episode and unleashed on a hostage audience. She makes a joke about holding the Gordon Ford Show audience hostage in the finale, but she’s different now. She’s wiser and sharper and more mature and knows completely how to get what she wants.

Her act has come a long way too. How long did you get to rehearse that four minutes of material?

Oh, there was no rehearsal before the day. I probably got the final version of that set about 48 hours before we shot it. And immediately panicked that I wasn’t going to be able to learn this volume of material in such a short period of time. It was intimidating, but it’s so beautifully written and it really flows.