‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ Cast Looks Back on Their Characters’ Evolution
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[The following story includes spoilers for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.]
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel may have come to a close on May 26, but the characters at the heart of the Emmy-winning series will stay with the castmembers who played them for much longer than that.
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The final season of the show from Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino saw the characters at the heart of it accomplish satisfying arcs — from one of the leads going to jail for his ex-wife to two other characters running in between stand-still traffic on New York City’s Upper West Side to support their daughter.
Miriam “Midge” Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) and her father, Abe Weissman (Tony Shalhoub), have perhaps come further than most pairs in the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. They went from not understanding each other and not having much of a relationship in season one to realizing they’re a lot more like the other than either of them realized when the show kicked off.
Michael Zegen, who plays Joel Maisel, began the series by cheating on his wife, Midge, with his assistant, and eventually leaving Midge for her. It’s the catalyst that sends the five-season series in the direction it went. Midge drunkenly stumbles into the Gaslight Cafe after finding out and performs her first comedy set, which Susie Myerson (Alex Borstein) sees and immediately knows that she will be a star one day.
By the end of the fifth and final season, Joel has more than redeemed himself, having gone to jail to protect Midge. Episode six, “The Testi-Roastial,” reveals that after Joel confronts Susie about her involvement with the mob and how it will affect Midge’s career, he goes to mobsters Frank (Erik Palladino) and Nicky (John Scurti) and offers himself up, instead of Midge.
He tells them he owns a club and wants to expand. If they finance him, they can use his clubs for all of their mob needs, telling them that he wants to make sure the mother of his kids is clear of them. It’s later revealed that Joel was arrested by the FBI for racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering.
At the beginning of the series, Midge’s mother, Rose Weissman (Marin Hinkle), is the perfect 1950s housewife. She takes care of their apartment, always dresses to the nines and spends her life taking care of her family. By the end of season one, Rose’s life has become so different than she expected it to be, she decides to move to Paris to start fresh there. As the series goes on, Rose remains in denial about her daughter pursuing a life as a comedian but stumbles into a career as a matchmaker.
The final episode of the series, “Four Minutes,” sees Rose and Abe run through the streets of New York to try to find a cab downtown in order to support Midge, who’s making an appearance on The Gordon Ford Show. During their daughter’s life-changing, four-minute set on live television, Rose and Abe are seen laughing along and agreeing with her jokes about them.
Below, Zegen, Hinkle, Kevin Pollak, who plays Moishe Maisel, and Caroline Aaron, who takes on the role of Shirley Maisel, open up about their characters’ arcs from the start of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel to the final moments of the series.
Rachel Brosnahan on Midge Maisel and Abe Weissman
“I love the relationship between Midge and Abe. Theirs feels like one that maybe has grown the most. When we first meet these characters, Midge is really close with her mother, and her dream, her biggest goal would be to be exactly like Rose. She wants to be as fabulously dressed and as thin and wants to move up just a couple floors in their building and is modeling herself after her mother, who she looks up to and admires. But over the course of the show, she realizes that she’s a lot more like Abe than she ever thought possible, and he realizes that he’s a lot more like her — or wants to be more like her — than he ever realized, and the growth of their relationship has been so moving.”
Michael Zegen on Joel Maisel
“I can’t think of a better journey than Joel’s really. It started out bad. He leaves her, and the audience immediately hated Joel and obviously took Midge’s side, and it almost felt like sometimes I was trying to win the audience back, even though it had nothing to do with me. It’s how it was written, it was the character, but I did take it a little personally when people would say things to me on the street or wherever, ‘cause people are very honest and very opinionated — and rightly so.”
“I feel like his whole path was just leading to this redemption, which I think he accomplished. It’s not just me, it was him. He was trying to make up for the fact that he left her in this horrible position, but it really turned out to be the best thing for everybody if you think about it. Everybody kind of found this new path of theirs, and everybody had a new profession by the end, and that was because of the fact that he left her.”
Marin Hinkle on Rose Weissman
“Amy and Dan have taught me the actual joy of not knowing the way life is. I had no idea in season one, that I was going to embark on a person that would be from Oklahoma that was going to say goodbye to the family money; that was going to end up in Paris saying goodbye to her own family to try and rediscover her own kind of youth and connection, then to the love life in her marriage; and then end up having a matchmaking [business] and all this stuff. Nobody could ever [have seen that] in that first year. I think I would have played her differently, and then it wouldn’t have been able to be true to the moment.”
Kevin Pollak on Moishe Maisel
“Season three, I think it was, that Moishe chooses another path … for his son. [He] gives him a check and says, ‘You’re fired, get out,’ [so he can pursue his dream of opening a club]. That sort of support is quite rare, and then can’t wait to celebrate his son’s success. Amy and Dan’s ability to surprise you with where these stories go, it was easy for me, Kevin, to imagine that Moishe would have his own private table at his son’s club. This is my seat at the bar. I’m always there. Make sure no one’s in my seat. And they went in such an inventive, creative way, in my opinion, and hilarious, that we finally have Shirley and Moishe both showing up at the club, not claiming it as their own but so delighted and amazed to be in this world, in this place, and instantly taking over the space and making it their own, and they’re not there to celebrate their son. They’re there to be sort of loud and obnoxious because that’s who they are. But I do love that celebration from father to son about how the club goes.”
Caroline Aaron on Shirley Maisel
“Even from the beginning, in a way, I thought of Shirley as being outside of the norm in a sense that, as wacky as it was, she was part of their money. She was part of their business. Rose is more decorative and is not really aware of the mechanics of the family and how it works and where the money is coming from and on and on and on. But Shirley does know from the beginning what is Maisel & Roth [Garment Company]. How does this business work? She’s often down there. For a while, she is really his assistant, and I think, in that sense, she’s a survivor. And I think that she would survive in a way. The idea of yes, it would be incredibly brave. But the alternative is to not be in the right place or in the right relationship, and I don’t think she would accept that as easily as she would the challenge of being alone.”
All five seasons of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel are available to stream on Prime Video.
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