The Marvelous Return of Mrs. Maisel
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Filming for the fourth season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel had a number of false starts. First, the cast was told they’d be back on set in September 2020. Then November. Then December. By the time they finally returned to their Brooklyn studios in late January 2021, the team behind Maisel cast more than ready to get back to work.
“We wanted to be back,” Caroline Aaron, who plays Shirley Maisel on the show, says. “We were so excited to be back.”
Mind you, when they did make that long-awaited return to set, the world was very much still in the middle of a pandemic, and there wasn’t an approved vaccine yet. So, it'd be safe to assume that the process of filming the show would be very different from non-pandemic times. But, according to Tony Shalhoub, or Abe Weissman as viewers know him, “It was our lives outside of work that were so different.”
“Normally, you finish a day of work and then you go home, or you go out to dinner, or you have a weekend, or whatever,” he says. “This is not like that. The world outside of work was the weird part.”
Alex Borstein, who plays Susie Myerson, Midge’s rough-around-the-edges manager, also saw filming as a brief escape from the anxieties of the pandemic.
“As an actor, your greatest moments are when they call action and you’re into it, and you’re just fucking completely in that scene with that other actor,” she says. “And now it was twofold because it was a chance where you could take your mask off. It was so satisfying to have that escape. It was a few precious moments,” and then the director would call cut, and masks went back on, and everyone retreated to their socially distanced metaphorical corners.
“You felt suffocated by so much of COVID life, and in that moment, you could be free. Acting with somebody, it was like this incredible gift, luxury, pleasure,” Borstein continues. Not to mention, it felt clandestine, taboo, vulnerable. Taking masks off, Borstein says, “was like face porn. Like taking our underwear off.”
For the production crew, accommodating COVID restrictions meant even more work than usual. Anyone who has seen even just one episode of Maisel knows how crucial the sets are in creating a period look and feel, but the show was limited in how often they could shoot on location, so the crew largely had to work within sound stages.
They built replica houses, theaters, storefronts, streets, butcher shops. All in all, between 40 and 50 sets were created just for season four—and these aren’t simple prop buildings; everything the audience sees has been carefully curated. The props and décor are true to the era. See the ash trays in the background? There’s actual ash and cigarette butts in all of them. Open a random drawer on set, there’ll be period-appropriate objects in it, even if they’re never shown onscreen. At Joel’s Button Club, there are real menus on the table printed with a full cocktail list on the inside. A martini? 25 cents. (One can dream.) The team does this to make it a fully immersive experience for the cast, which then translates to the screen. Shalhoub says that all these details “absolutely” make a difference in an actor’s performance.
One of the new sets is the strip club that Midge begins working at this season; it’s one of the focal points of her storyline. (No, she isn’t dancing.) It’s supposed to be a kind of seedy place, but it’s beautiful—millennial pink everywhere, ambient lighting coming from deep emerald green lampshades on each table, a huge, stunning chandelier. And it's where Midge transforms as a comic.
“This season is about Midge digging her heels in, for better or worse and saying, ‘If I’m gonna do this—if I’m gonna make all these sacrifices, if I’m gonna leave my children for weeks and months on end, leave my family, if it’s gonna make it so that I can’t hold other personal relationships—then I’m gonna be me all the time. Unapologetically.’ And that’s a new side of Midge,” actress Rachel Brosnahan, who plays the titular Mrs. Maisel, says.
So what else can viewers expect from this season? Many TV dramas and sitcoms with modern settings found ways to incorporate the pandemic into their stories, but that wasn’t an option for Maisel. “I think they made a big commitment not to let the storytelling be tyrannized by what was going on,” Aaron says of writers and creators Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino. “They were gonna tell the story.”
Instead, this season focuses in on personal development for each character. “They really did drill down,” Kevin Pollak, who plays Moishe Maisel, Midge's ex-father-in-law, explains. “The audience is finding out more about who these people are, what makes them tick, what they actually think about each other.”
The Maisel cast is a family both on-screen and off. And if nothing else, all that unwanted time away from work—and each other—made the actors cherish their experience filming season four more than ever. “It made us so immensely grateful for every moment of this season,” says Brosnahan. “It’s a fucking hard show to shoot; no one can deny that. It’s difficult and it’s always been difficult. It’s always been worth it.”
But it's always been worth it.
“Somehow after this time away, and all this turmoil in the world at large, we got to escape into this magical bubble and be around people that we love, making a show we love.”
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is airing now on Prime Video.
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