photographY regan cameron sTYLING Julianna Alabado
woman
achel Brosnahan and I are walking her dogs on New York’s Upper West Side. On one lead is Winston, a fiercely independent Shiba Inu who Brosnahan calls her roommate. On the other is Nikki, a 16-year-old pitbull-cross who Brosnahan calls her soulmate. “She’s so emotionally intelligent and cuddly. I am not by nature the most
She was marvellous as Mrs Maisel and now she’s fighting the good fight as Lois Lane. Rachel Brosnahan loves to play make-believe, but, as she tells Kathryn Madden, she’s learning a lot about herself along the way.
R
cuddly [person], and I feel like she completes me,” says the actor as we pass sun-warmed brownstones, each more charming than the next. Her dogs stop to sniff a stoop that might have starred in a Nora Ephron romcom, dark green ivy spilling over its edges.
Except that’s not entirely true. I’m 16,000 kilometres away in Sydney, and Brosnahan is describing what we would be doing if we were together in New York, her home for the past 17 years. “It’s the perfect season for it and the weather here just got so beautiful,” she tells me, looking out the window from the back of a car. “I’m taking you on a good local walk, maybe up Riverside Drive.”
If there’s one person poised and primed for a game of make-believe, it’s Rachel Brosnahan. One of today’s most exciting actors, she’s the kind of performer who disappears into roles, her presence quietly commanding. She played sex worker Rachel across three seasons of House of Cards, then charmed audiences in The Marvelous Mrs Maisel as the titular 1950s housewife who defies the patriarchy as a stand-up comic. People still to this day tell Brosnahan they can’t believe that the former was played by the same actor as the latter. Call it range; call her a chameleon. Now, she takes on another feminist heroine in the shape of Lois Lane in the cinematic reboot of Superman, out July 10. Co-starring David Corenswet (The Politician; Hollywood) as Clark Kent/Superman, and Nicholas Hoult (About a Boy; The Great) as Lex Luthor, it’s the first movie in the new DC Universe franchise and it has the comic-book superfandom abuzz.
Lois Lane’s legacy is long and rich: Margot Kidder, Teri Hatcher, Kate Bosworth and Amy Adams have all portrayed the headstrong reporter. To figure out her own imagining of the role, Brosnahan met with investigative journalists and studied their practice. “So much of journalism feels similar to acting,” she muses. “It’s just that in investigative journalism, you’re reaching out and investigating the world around you, [but] some of my favourite investigative journalism also involves intensive character study. And that’s what we do as actors. If we’re lucky enough to build roles and worlds that are far away from ourselves, we get to do so much research. I can’t claim that the stakes are quite so high, but some of the approach feels the same.”
One thing to know about Brosnahan is that her commitment is unflinching. She goes all in. During her five-season run as the beloved and brazen Miriam “Midge” Maisel, so impressive were her comedy sets that people urged her to try stand-up in real life. Since playing Lois, she feels more of a pull to investigative reporting. “Oh, I’d choose journalism [over comedy]. Every time,” she says emphatically. “There are very few things scarier to me than stand-up comedy.”
But lots of things scare Brosnahan. “I’m always terrified,” she says with a nervous laugh. “But I’m not crushed by it, I suppose.” Sometimes before a big day on set she’ll stand in front of a mirror and power pose, hands on hips, chest thrust forward, tricking herself into a false sense of confidence. “I guess that’s something that Lois and I have in common: we’re both motivated by the word ‘no’, but also by fear. It motivates you to do more and to do better. I feel like when you get scared, it’s because you’re on the precipice of some kind of change. And so while it’s not always the most comfortable feeling, I’ve been fortunate enough to be challenged to try new things all the time in this profession. I get to be scared a lot, and not everybody has that opportunity. So I feel lucky.”
“You can intellectualise and try to build a character ... But until you can stand in their skin and in their clothes, I don’t know that they feel fully realised.”
“In some ways I became an actor because I didn’t want to have to be myself all the time, and I didn’t want to have to live with myself all the time.”
Rachel wears Christian Dior.
Rachel wears Christian Dior.
CREDITS
Talent: rachel brosnahan
Editor: Georgie McCourt
Creative Director: Juanita Field
art director: rebecca rhodes
interview: Kathryn Madden
PHOTOGRAPHER: Regan Cameron/WIB Agency
stylist: Julianna Alabado/Bridge Artists
Hair: Clay Nielsen/Tracey Mattingly
Makeup: Lisa Aharon/The Wall Group
Manicure: Elle Gerstein/Opus Beauty
Production: Robyn Fay-Perkins and Noted Collective Shot on location at The Plaza, a Fairmont Managed Hotel
When we speak, Brosnahan is on her way home from a post-production audio session where she saw clips of the film for the first time. “I don’t usually watch my [work], it makes me anxious and miserable,” she admits. “So it was not fun at first, but I had a task. I was there to make it better. And we got to see some movie magic which was pretty cool, like the final Krypto [Superman’s CGI dog].” The soaring musical score, complete with spine-tingling orchestral strains from the original 1978 theme, had not yet been integrated, but will only heighten what Brosnahan hopes is a thrilling and optimistic piece of cinema. So will she watch the final cut in all its big-hearted, pulse-pounding glory? “That’s the million-dollar question,” she says with a laugh. “I was pretty committed to not watching, and then David and Nick texted me saying, ‘Are you going to see it? Maybe we should watch it together, the three of us, and make a moment of it.’ And I would be sad to miss that – it feels like a core memory, so I’m fighting with myself right now. I don’t want to torture myself, but also ... FOMO.”
Perceived or real, Brosnahan’s relatability is probably tied up in where she chooses to live, far from the sheen of Hollywood (after graduating from NYU’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts in 2012, she moved to LA briefly and hated it). She shares her New York apartment and dogs with her husband, actor Jason Ralph, who she met in 2013 on the set of the indie film I’m Obsessed With You (But You’ve Got to Leave Me Alone). He doesn’t come up in our conversation; as Brosnahan fairly pointed out in an interview with People, “While we are both the leads of successful television series, [Jason] has almost never been asked about our relationship, while I have been asked on almost every red carpet I have walked ... We both find this double standard problematic and frustrating and opted to redirect those conversations to our work.”
Joining the DC universe will mean a whirl of publicity for the private Brosnahan. In April she appeared with the cast for the first time at CinemaCon, and wore a vintage Galliano newspaper-print minidress – a nod to not only Lois Lane but fellow newspaper-wearing It journalist Carrie Bradshaw. “That was a fun one to pull out of the archives,” she says brightly. Fashion is a frillier side of the industry she enjoys, especially when it feeds into the art of playing pretend. “Often it doesn’t feel like a character really comes to life until I can look in the mirror and see them,” she explains. “You can intellectualise and try to build a character; you can try to pull the character off the page at home in your sweatpants. But until you can stand in their skin and in their clothes, I don’t know that they feel fully realised.”
Style also runs in Brosnahan’s blood. Her aunt was Kate Spade (nee Brosnahan), the late, great designer who pioneered accessible luxury for the modern woman. “Growing up, I idolised her. I wanted to be her, [though] for a long time I didn’t even know that she worked in fashion. She was just my aunt who I thought was so cool, and I wanted to do my hair like her and to dress like her. And I don’t think I really understood the impact she’d made on the fashion world. She just made such an impact on me.”
Right now, the actor is craving time with her family, to just “be bored” together, a luxury she says will have to wait until August. Until then, her schedule is packed with “all good things”. She’s directing her first film, though details remain under wraps; she has her own production company, Scrap Paper Pictures; and she’s committed to using her platform to advocate for anti-poverty non-profit Global Citizen, and for Covenant House, which supports homeless youth. She’s thoughtful about the roles she wants to step into next ... maybe a return to theatre, maybe an intensely physical role that puts her wrestling skills to use. “I’m just interested in characters who are pushed to the limits of their humanity, and to see what happens when they arrive there,” she says. “Who do they become when they stand on the edge of the plank?”
You get the sense that while Brosnahan is warm and engaging – bright and fast-talking like Midge Maisel, determined and sharp like Lois Lane – this part of her job, the press and self-promotion, falls a few rungs down her priority list. Brosnahan always wanted to act, because she wanted to act.
“I’m very comfortable playing other people,” she says. “And in some ways I became an actor because I didn’t want to have to be myself all the time, and I didn’t want to have to live with myself all the time. I definitely get bored of being myself.” But being herself, she’s discovered, is the delicious mystery ingredient in the pie. “When we do a lot of press, especially the longer I’ve been doing this, I realise how important it is to hold on to your sense of self. Otherwise you can get lost in all these other people – not just in the characters you play, but in the people surrounding you in this sometimes weird and wild business, and in their expectations,” she continues. “It’s important to spend time with yourself and with people who know you as you. That way, you have a strong enough foundation to really leap off. To transform completely into other people without losing yourself.”
Rachel wears Christian Dior.
Rachel wears Christian Dior.
Rachel wears Christian Dior.
Rachel wears Christian Dior.
super
he Golden Globe Award Brosnahan won in 2018 for Best Actress in a Musical/Comedy Series used to sit on top of her toilet. It was an inspired use of space in a storage-squeezed New York apartment. But then she
T
won an Emmy and a Critics’ Choice award, and another Golden Globe plus a SAG award the following year. Quickly, her collection of statuettes outsized the cistern, a sure sign of breaking big in Hollywood. She hosted SNL and did skits and bits on late-night talk shows, all making Rachel Brosnahan, by any definition of the word, a star.
Except people love to point out that she’s refreshingly un-starry. “I never know whether to be grateful or insulted when people tell me that they’re surprised by how normal I am,” she says with a shrug. “I’m not quite sure what that means. I don’t know what other people are like. I just moved, but before that I was in the same apartment for nine years and I’ve had the same group of friends since high school and college. In some ways my life has changed a lot over that period. And in other ways it’s stayed exactly the same. I’m equally grateful for both.”
Rachel wears Christian Dior.
Rachel wears Christian Dior.
By this point in our chat, Brosnahan is out of the car, dodging pedestrians on their daily commute. And New York is New Yorking, horns beeping and blaring over her words. “Sorry,” she says with a wry smile. “Maybe a dog walk wouldn’t have been the right choice after all.”
Superman is in cinemas from July 10.
Brosnahan may not want to watch herself act, but she always wanted to act. She grew up in Illinois, in America’s Midwest, with her mum, her dad, who worked in children’s book publishing, and two younger siblings. Her great loves were theatre, wrestling (the Venn diagram-intersection of sports and acting) and escaping into fictional worlds like Lord of the Rings. The opportunity, then, to do an epic superhero film, the kind that sits at the juncture of fantasy and realism, seemed irresistible. Especially at this moment in time, in a world that increasingly feels like it needs saving. “It’s about superheroes and everyday heroes, fighting the good fight in pursuit of truth and justice,” Brosnahan explains. “These characters are grounded and real and three-dimensional. They’re also beloved. They’ve lived many lives before this movie, and it will be fun for fans to see this interpretation.”
“These characters are grounded and real and ... beloved. They’ve lived many lives before this movie, and it will be fun for fans to see this interpretation.”
Rachel wears Christian Dior.
Get the look
All products by Christian Dior. 1 shoes, $1650. 2 Dior Forever Skin Perfect Foundation Stick in 1N Neutral, $99. 3 bag, $14,500. 4 Gris Dior EDP, 100ml, $535. 5 Diorshow 5 Couleurs Couture Eyeshadow Palette in Silk Taupe, $120. 6 ring, $830.
