‘Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ Star Rachel Brosnahan Ensures Midge Has More Barriers to Break in Season 4 (Exclusive)

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel can only go up in Season 4 after the shocking cliffhanger from Season 3. Midge still has plenty of barriers to break in new episodes, since she isn’t going to let the Shy Baldwin tour setback keep her down. As star Rachel Brosnahan told PopCutlure.com in a recent interview, Midge is still on a career path that there are few precedents for in this period.

At the start of Season 4, fans will see Midge and her family back in the same familiar Weissman apartment while she’s still trying to succeed as a stand-up comedian. This highlights the competition within Midge to have something few women in the late 1950s had while also wanting a stable home situation and a better relationship with her ex-husband, Joel Maisel (Michael Zegen). “Change is hard, and Midge wants two really different and competing things, which is she wants to go back to a time when things were easier and simpler and more comfortable,” Brosnahan, who won an Emmy for playing Midge, told PopCulture.com. “She wants her old apartment.”

So on the one hand, Midge “wants to be how happy and comfortable and feel like herself,” but she’s also chasing after “this brand new thing that nobody has done before, and she wants to carve out her own path that there is no blueprint for,” Brosnahan said. “Those things being at odds with each other is what’s at the center of this season for Midge.”

One of the bigger mysteries heading into Season 4 is the role for Milo Ventimiglia, who previously worked with Maisel creator Amy Sherman-Palladino on Gilmore Girls. Brosnahan and Alex Borstein, who plays Midge’s manager Susie Myerson, were still tight-lipped about the This Is Us star’s role. “He’s doing Susie in the show,” Borstein joked, before Brosnahan added, “It’s pretty intense and boundary pushing for television as we know it.”

Sherman-Palladino also has a very definitive idea of where her characters are going. “Eight times out of 10,” she might pick up one of Borstein’s crazy ideas for Susie, but “in terms of story line or development, that’s all Amy,” Borstein said. Brosnahan agreed, but joked that sometimes, she’s afraid Sherman-Palladino and her husband, executive producer Daniel Palladino, might suggest something too crazy.

“She usually texts me a number of weird texts about once a season, because I’m convinced that they sit around thinking of new ways to try to murder me,” Brosnahan joked. “But once a season, I’ll get a text before we start going, ‘Can you ice skate? Do you speak French? Can you bowl? Do you play ping pong? Can you ride a bike?’ And I’m just like, ‘Oh, God, what are we going to be up to?’”

Another vital person behind-the-scenes at Maisel is costume designer Donna Zakowska, who has Emmys for John Adams and Maisel. She is also a “brilliant storyteller,” Brosnahan said, adding that she “has a really clear sense of how costumes can enhance the storytelling in any particular scene.” Since the show is now entering the ’60s, “there’s definitely more fun to be had in that department,” Brosnahan noted.

Mrs. Maisel Season 4 will debut on Prime Video on Feb. 18, over two years since Season 3 was released. Instead of releasing the entire season at once, two episodes will be published weekly.