Why The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel had to show Lenny Bruce as the tragic figure he became
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Warning: This article contains spoilers about The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel series finale, "Four Minutes."
On The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Lenny Bruce, as portrayed by Luke Kirby, is like something out of a fantasy — the fairy godfather to Rachel Brosnahan's Midge Maisel.
But in the real world, the final years of the Bruce's life were marked by lawsuits, turmoil, and a downward spiral fueled by drug addiction. In 1966, Bruce died at the age of 40 from a morphine overdose. While we don't see that tragic end in the series finale of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, we do get a glimpse of Bruce in the final act of his life.
The episode opens on Bruce in 1965, bombing at a shabby club in Northern California as he reads from his court documents. Following the set, Susie (Alex Borstein) catches up with him backstage and offers to represent him to help get him back on his feet. He declines, but does ask after Midge, who we learn is waiting outside to see if Susie can change his mind.
It's been four years in the show's timeline since Midge and Lenny said goodbye at the airport in the season 5 premiere. But Kirby surmises that Bruce has been carrying a torch for Midge throughout that time. "His belief in the light that she carries, he will always carry that," he tells EW. "I don't think that he's in a position to be spending too many of his hours thinking about the one that got away or anything in that regard. He's a busy guy. But I certainly think that he wants good things for her and is happy to see her when she thrives."
Amazon Studios Luke Kirby on 'The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel'
With that in mind, he does ask to see Midge that night in 1965, thought it's unclear whether he's eager to see her or wary of Midge seeing him in this state. Kirby believes it's the former. "He would love to see her," he says. "That's my impression."
But why, other than, y'know, the historical record, does he reject Susie's attempt to help him? And why does Susie lie about Midge's presence?
"Her presenting him with a way out is just a fantasy," muses Kirby. "She might as well be inviting him to Disneyland in that moment. It's not a reality that he can see. She's talking time machine talk. You can't go backwards, you know?"
Adds Borstein, in regards to her view of the scene: "I was sent there on a fool's errand by Midge to try and save him. Midge knows what's coming. She sees the writing on the wall, and I was sent in to try to pull him out from the devil's mouth. She didn't want him to know it was her doing it. She felt like he wouldn't respond to her. What I took from it is she's made many attempts. She's sending Susie in to see if there's a last hope."
The showrunners have consistently played with how much of this Lenny Bruce was drawn from fact and how much was their own invention. But the question always loomed whether we'd see his demise.
"It would be hard to do that without it being kind of ghoulish," says Kirby. "It's not the show to do it like that. There's so many descriptions about Lenny's last days and last moments out there. I had no real yearning to play it out. We were taking certain liberties and the thing that we really adhered to that was the real Lenny Bruce was his performances. That's when we were doing him verbatim. But when he was inside of the story of Mrs. Maisel, he was a little bit free from his history."
Because of that, Kirby didn't even know he was going to be asked back to do the finale until three weeks before they shot it. He assumed he'd said Lenny's goodbyes in episode 1 of the season. In fact, creator Amy Sherman-Palladino says they did debate whether to include a mention of Lenny's death or a scene where Midge learns the news, but ultimately decided against it.
"We did discuss it," she tells EW. "But the thing about it is when you're dealing with somebody as iconic as Lenny Bruce, everybody knows how it ended. Everybody's seen that horrible picture that they ran of him on the floor. What does that give us? We know Midge will be sad. But in the context of our story, Lenny was her guardian angel. He's the one who treated her as an equal, as a peer instead of like a cute girl, right off the bat.
"He is the person that exemplifies the best of what this profession could be and the worst of what it can be," she continues. "Carnegie Hall was the last time we saw him perform, where he was on top of the world. The next time we see him perform, he's spiraling down to a fate that we all know about."
Prime Video Luke Kirby on 'The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel'
Indeed, Sherman-Palladino has such an affection for the Maisel version of Bruce that she couldn't bear to end on the tragic version of him, giving audiences one last scene between him and Midge from the night they consummated their relationship. They eat in a Chinese restaurant and Lenny gives Midge a fortune predicting her fame and success. We realize that this is the fortune Midge tucked in her bra before her career-making set on The Gordon Ford Show as a good luck charm.
"We wanted to leave the audience and our world on the Lenny Bruce that we love and admire so much," says Sherman-Palladino. "Which is the man who was in his prime, in his moment and encouraging her to now go out and find her moment."
Kirby found a poetic justice in getting that final grace note between them. "It was really beautiful," he reflects. "Because it solidified that what me and Rachel were doing together was really happening. I felt like I got a gold star. I never had any aspiration or wish that there would be some rewriting of history. I knew that we weren't going to turn into a Lenny biopic, but I also didn't want to reshape his destiny. I love when that happens in certain stories, but it didn't feel right for this. But it was really nice to find a way that he has a presence in her life without him being there."
In the scene, Lenny tells Midge that she's going to be really famous, then inventing a fortune that reads, "The spotlight waits for you. It is waiting for you to step up and claim it." It seems perhaps odd that Bruce, who had a tense and complicated relationship with fame in his real life, would wish this for Midge — but Kirby sees it as encouraging her to embrace the inevitable.
"It's not about you're going to get everything you ever wanted and everything's going to be easy," he says. "The die is cast. The responsibility now falls on you to keep at it because the talent's been identified. I don't think that Lenny's talent was a burden to him either. I think what burdened him was the confusion that some institutions had about his comedy. Then it turned into an agenda to try to send him to ruin. I don't think it was the fame that did that."
Philippe Antonello/Prime Rachel Brosnahan and Luke Kirby on 'The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel'
There are, of course, some fans who would've preferred the show rewrite history, though Kirby says there were never any serious conversations about doing something of that nature. "I always would make jokes about them having a wedding, but I didn't really want them to take that seriously," he says with a laugh.
Still, Kirby was initially hired as a one-episode guest star, a funny wink to the real comedians of the era colliding with the fictional Midge Maisel. It was his performance and his crackling chemistry with Brosnahan that kept the writers bringing him back. Does he think things would've gone differently if he'd been cast as a completely fictional character from the beginning? Perhaps a happy ending with Midge?
"I don't think that it would've [gone differently]," he says, after pondering the proposition for a moment. "I owe it all to Lenny Bruce. I don't know that they would've worked well together if it wasn't him."
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