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. 

You’ve been playing Midge for six years. Do you feel more comfortable doing stand-up than you did when you started?

A little bit, but one of the gifts of working on this show has been that they never allowed any of us to get comfortable. Every time you think you have a grasp on who your character is or the technical elements of playing them, like doing standup, they throw you for a loop. The final set was, I think, the longest one I’ve ever done with very little time to learn it. And a lot of the folks who were sitting in the audience that night had never seen me do stand-up before the show—Kevin [Pollak] and Caroline [Aaron]. It had been a long time since Michael Zegen had seen it. Tony [Shalhoub] has only been there one time in season two. So it was very intimidating to look out at our Maisel family. But also I felt so wrapped in support and loved—it was a really special day.

Have you heard from any real-life comedians in response to your performance as a stand-up?

There’s definitely been support from the community, which I appreciate. That was the most terrifying part of stepping into Midge’s shoes: [the idea of] becoming an embarrassment to the comedians I’ve looked up to for so long. Carol Burnett and Ali Wong were so kind. . . .I watched Baby Cobra maybe a hundred times when I was preparing for the show. Chelsea Handler, Sarah Silverman have been so kind. I’ve had the privilege of meeting a few of the women I have looked up to. Either I have not been an embarrassment or they’re brilliant liars [laughs]. Hard to say .

For the first time in the series, Susie [Alex Borstein] opens up to Midge about her sexuality and romantic history. And she ends up getting Gordon [Reid Scott] to book Midge by asking her ex-girlfriend Hedy [Nina Arianda] for a favor. It isn’t easy for Susie to do, but she does it because of her love for and belief in Midge. Can you talk about finally getting to know about Susie’s backstory this season?

Midge and Susie are the central love story of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and we’ve watched their relationship grow over time. Their trust grow over time, their love grow over time. And the fact that Susie feels comfortable enough with Midge to share that deeply vulnerable part of herself, especially in the 1950s when that wasn’t really something you spoke about openly, it’s a marker of how far they’ve come and how much they've grown. I’m glad that we got a look into some of Susie’s history, but also to be able to sit across from Alex and listen to her deliver that story was astonishing.

At what point did you realize that Mitch and Susie were soulmates?

When they have that drink together [after Susie bails Midge out of jail in the pilot]. Susie sees something in Midge that she’s never seen herself. And Midge sees in Susie, whether or not either of them can articulate it, a partner and a support system, the likes of which she has never experienced. They dive in together head first and do this crazy thing. They lean on each other and sometimes kick each other in the ass. They get doors shut in their faces, and find a doggy door or a bathroom window and lift each other through it.

Does your friendship with Alex mirror Midge and Susie’s? I imagine you have a unique relationship, having played out this dynamic for six years.

We do. We didn’t know each other at all before the chemistry read together, and met in a very tiny, hot audition room. We did a long walk and talk in a room that was about four feet by four feet. So we just walked around in circles with scripts in our hands. And even in the most undesirable of circumstances, the chemistry was there from the jump. We are polar opposites in so many ways, but we complete each other in a way that’s not totally dissimilar from Mitch and Susie. There’s an enormous amount of love and respect there. We’ve gotten to know each other over the last five years, and this friendship is a forever one.

What did you think when you saw that the finale ends with Midge and Susie on the phone watching Jeopardy! together?

[Laughs] We were just like, “This is where these two broads end up? It’s perfect.”

One of the most surprising twists of the season is Susie betraying Midge in terms of the mob involvement. And Joel going to prison is not something I anticipated.

We didn't either. We were so shocked. I think [the characters] are just as surprised by the way it unfolds, Susie included. I don’t think anyone intends to sell their souls to the mob. Susie’s scrappy. She knows how to survive and that was the way she figured out how to in the moment, and then it got ahead of her and beyond her, and she didn’t know how to get out. It makes sense to me, although it was a wild turn of events that surprised us all—that Joel would step in and take one for Midge.

They almost end up rekindling their relationship this season.

I think the love between them runs really deep, and it made sense to me that he would continue to look out for her. [Going to prison] is certainly the ultimate sacrifice that speaks very loudly about how they feel about each other. There was actually more to that scene in the jail that was cut, that leaned into how their relationship has continued to evolve. Basically, that they're still hot for each other while he’s in prison. You know, those two are chaotic .

They are chaotic, but I was happy she ended up single. Was there any part of you that thought she should have ended up with Joel?

No. Amy always said to me that Midge and Joel would always be a part of each other’s lives, but that they would never again be on the same page at the same time. That made sense to me. And Midge is married to her career. She has decided—for better, for worse—that that’ll be the predominant romantic relationship in her life. And that the only other one she needs is Susie. Everyone else comes and goes.

How do you feel about the way the Lenny [Luke Kirby] and Midge storyline wrapped up? The episode opens with this devastating scene of Lenny in San Francisco, clearly on drugs, and Midge refusing to see him even though she’s in town. Then later we get a flashback that shows happier times in their relationship.

I thought they handled it really well. We were all waiting to see what the button would be on that relationship. And so many people know how tragically Lenny Bruce’s story ended. This feels like a respectful nod to the true history, but also keeps the magic of their fictional relationship on our show alive.

How did you feel about the old-age makeup you had to wear?

It was traumatizing. They had us do these fittings and 3D scans, and showed us some mockups [of what we’d look like decades from now]. I was like, “Oh my god, I look like Mamie Eisenhower.” It’s a glimpse into one’s own mortality that I don’t wish on anyone. It was tough—many, many hours in makeup not to play some kind of cool creature or alien or person with power, but to be you deep in the future. It’s all based on your own facial expressions and patterns. But it was cool to watch the art of that practical makeup up close.

You wrapped the show and, instead of taking a break, started doing a stage show: The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window with Oscar Isaac, which is now on Broadway.

I had done the reading of the The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window with a group of actors, including Oscar and our director Annie Kaufman in 2019, because the original intention was to do the show in 2020. Then the world shut down. I got a call while we were shooting this past season of Maisel saying, “We wanna do another reading and hear it out loud and see how it feels since the world is different now.” And I had never heard of this play before being asked to do that reading. It’s such a beautiful piece of writing. It somehow feels more relevant than ever. It’s grappling with so many big questions about identity and politics and what it means to be an artist, what it means to be a human, and what our responsibilities are to each other and to the world around us.

When the play was written in the 1960s [by Lorraine Hansberry], the world was on the brink of this great and overdue change, and it feels like we’re right back there. We were supposed to do a limited run at the [Brooklyn Academy of Music]. And, towards the end of the run, we learned that a Broadway theater had become unexpectedly available. After talking to Jeremy O. Harris, who’s a playwright and producer, he made a bunch of calls and told me they were going to get it up on Broadway, and he did. And here we are. We’ve got about seven weeks left.

You’re doing eight performances a week. Does it make mourning Midge any easier?

It helps. It’s like when you break up with someone and and you get a new boyfriend or girlfriend right away. There was a brief period of mourning between the BAM run and the Broadway run. When we began promoting the final season, we got the band back together again. I went back into the rehearsal process for this show feeling sad and, and like my heartstrings were being tugged at. But I think we’ll be mourning the show for a long time.