![]() Photograph: Erik Madigan Heck/Trunkarchive ‘I see it as a reclaiming of gangster films through a female gaze’: Rachel Brosnahan. My sense of empathy has grown enormously in the 12 years I’ve been doing this because you have to figure out how to embody people that are so far away from who you are. I’ve seen red-carpet interviews where I’m talking a million miles an hour and being like, who is that?” She is grateful for this skill. “I catch myselfsometimes, in situations where I feel vulnerable, turning it on without realising. But recently she’s noticed she’s able to channel Midge. While she plays Maisel as a whirling, perfumed storm of conviction, Brosnahan is cautious and shy – this year she has come to identify as an introvert, someone who becomes exhausted after interacting with too many people. “I spent a lot of time trying to ramp up my internal metronome to the speed of Midge and trying to channel her confidence, which,” Brosnahan chuckles mournfully, “remains one of the most challenging things about playing this part.” The show became beloved by inter-generational audiences as much for its tap-dancing dialogue and rich Technicolor beauty as its cheery small-f feminism. She puts her family’s dinner on the table, then sneaks out to serve it up again as a punchline. Three seasons of Maisel saw Midge transforming her experiences as a wealthy Jewish housewife – the kind of woman who wakes up twice every night, first to remove her makeup, then again at dawn to reapply it, so her husband is never greeted without lipstick – into a standup career. But no, I will accept this agony for the pleasure of spending a minute with the Marvellous Rachel Brosnahan, whose makeup-less skin appears to emit, rather than reflect, the Santa Fe light, and whose earnest positivity is, well, a balm. “I could turn off the camera,” she offers kindly. Here in London the sun set at teatime and it’s been raining since dawn. It’s morning there, and she turns her laptop towards the window to show me the miles of sand beyond, with its pimples of grass, the impossible sky, a single cloud. A bookish “serious nerd” born in Milwaukee, she grew up in a sporty family, eventually persuading her publisher father and British mother that, though she’d been a snowboarding tutor and on the school wrestling team for years, her future was on stage. ![]() If not, I’d definitely get eaten.”īrosnahan used to wrestle. “I’ve picked up a thing or two.” Short pause while she considers it with some seriousness. If Brosnahan were to be dropped into a jungle tomorrow, she’s confident she’d be absolutely fine. Having completed the final series she graduated to a History Channel show called Alone, which is the same, but lonely. ![]() “People from all different walks of life thrown together in a survival situation.” She has the Survivor patter, she has the Survivor socks, she has the Survivor water bottle, and, importantly, she has learned the Survivor lessons. “It really is a mirror for our society,” she chirrups over Zoom, in the way people deep into a reality show sometimes do. There are 40 seasons of this reality show where contestants are marooned and left to fend for themselves, and for her and her husband Jason, this was… a re-watch. D uring lockdown in New York, Rachel Brosnahan really got into Survivor.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |