Rachel Brosnahan

Early in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017), Midge Maisel's husband walks out, and she goes downtown to the club where he used to perform other people's material, gets up drunk, and is better at it than he ever was. It is the moment the whole series stands on, and Brosnahan does not play it as a triumph. What she puts on Midge's face is relief, as if she has finally found the room where all that speed is wanted. We were surprised by how much we wanted her to be good, and the surprise was her doing: in the scenes before it she had already shown us, without a line to say so, what the tidy life had cost.

The trick is that the talking never covers for the person. Amy Sherman-Palladino, who made her name with Gilmore Girls, writes dialogue at a pace that turns most actors into delivery systems, and much of the Maisel cast ends up sounding alike. Brosnahan does not. Midge is vain, tactless, rich and certain, and Brosnahan plays every one of those things straight, never asking to be liked and never winking at us over the character's head. Across five seasons, alongside Alex Borstein and under Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, that was the show's one dependable asset. By the end it was also its problem. We knew the rhythm of every line before it arrived, and the rhythm was hers.

It took a while to get there. She spent her university years in guest parts on Gossip Girl, Grey's Anatomy and CSI: Miami, then a small role that grew into a recurring one as Rachel Posner in House of Cards (2013–15), and a period part as Abby Isaacs in Manhattan (2014). Those were dramatic jobs, and nothing in them announced a comic. Then Sherman-Palladino handed her a microphone.

Superman (2025) is the test of whether the voice travels, and the answer is partly. James Gunn's Lois Lane is quicker than David Corenswet's Superman and knows it, and the film's best written scene is the two of them on a sofa in her flat, arguing about what he did and why. Nobody flies. Nothing blows up. Brosnahan is at her best there, pressing and interrupting and refusing the easy answer, and then the film goes back to adding characters and crises until the last act is mostly noise, and there is less for her to do in the rest of it than that scene suggests there could be.

The Amateur (2025) puts her in a thriller, as Sarah, and we will see. On present evidence she is best served by a writer who trusts a room with two people in it and lets one of them talk. Sherman-Palladino gave her five seasons of that. Gunn gave her one scene. Somebody should give her a whole film.