Movies - TV
Rachel Brosnahan's Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Callback Couldn't Have Come At A Worse Time
By LEIGH GIANGRECO
After winning an Emmy and two Golden Globes for her titular role in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Rachel Brosnahan in the role. However, in an interview with Vulture, Brosnahan revealed that she almost didn’t get the part, because she was feeling deathly ill when she got the call to fly out to Los Angeles for her second audition.
Brosnahan said she felt like she “had the plague” when she got the callback. She ended up canceling her audition, but was worried that she would lose the part, so she “rallied and a couple of days later I was like, ‘I'm gonna go,’ and I was a disaster [...] I couldn't touch anybody. My feet were sweating so much I had to take my shoes off part of the way through the audition.”
While Brosnahan thought she had wrecked her audition, little did she know that casting director Jeanie Bacharach actually had her in mind when she read Amy and Dan Palladino's script. The writing couple weren’t comfortable offering the part to the actress without auditioning, so when she finally did, everyone knew that they had found their Mrs. Maisel.
Bacharach explained that when Brosnahan acted “the big drunken monologue [that] was part of the audition process, [...] she nailed it in a way that other people had not found.” While Brosnahan did not have a comedic background, the actress knew “where the comedy [was] and to make the adjustment” and understood “the importance of language, which for Amy is key to her pages and pages of dialogue."