Michael Zegen Is the Memorable Mr. Maisel

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When Michael Zegen first heard about the role of Joel Maisel on Amazon Prime’s hit series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, he thought it would be a small part at most—but that didn’t make him want it any less. “I used to read so many scripts and everything sucked for the most part and this one didn’t,” he laughs about the pilot episode he was sent, in which Joel abandons his wife for his secretary, spurring the spurned Midge to a new career in stand-up comedy. “I thought I was perfect for it, I really did. Even the description of him, I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s me.’ I actually thought he would be a recurring character, maybe he would pop in every once in a while, because he leaves halfway through. Then when I got the breakdown of the characters and it said that he’s a series regular, I was like, ‘Alright, I want this really badly.’ And I got it, fortunately.”

Since then, the series, from Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and set in a perfectly art-directed version of late-Fifties New York, has become an international sensation, pulling in five Emmys and three Golden Globes so far and winning fans from Italy to India. Rachel Brosnahan‘s Midge Maisel is the centerpiece of the show as she makes her way from housewife to stand-up star, but Zegen’s Joel has also developed in rewarding and unexpected ways over eighteen episodes, becoming much more than just the ineffectual philanderer of the first season, shown futilely pursuing the comedy career that comes so naturally to his estranged wife, who easily spins her marital troubles and family dramas into endless laughs. “I really thought he was going to disappear after the first episode and I thought, ‘Ok he’s the antagonist,’ but that’s not the case,” Zegen explains. “He’s not the antagonist. If anything, he’s rooting for her—well now he is. I did go into it thinking, ‘Oh yeah, the audience is going to hate him,’ and embracing that, but then as the series progressed, you learn a lot about him.”

After a first season in which Joel is mostly seen forging his new life with his secretary Penny Pann while Midge tries to pick up the pieces of her own, Zegen points to the season finale as a key shift in their relationship and one that helped establish Joel’s new position. “I think the best scene was the end of the last episode of season one where I see her perform,” he elaborates. “That’s the turning point for the audience where they’re like, ‘Oh wait, he’s actually not that bad a guy.’ I remember reading that and it took my breath away. I thought he was going to run up on stage or something or ruin her set but instead, he defends her, and that added so much to my character for me that I never even saw coming.” The second season, in which Joel’s backstory is given more attention as he joins the family business manufacturing clothing, gave Zegen even more to work with while the audience consensus shifted gradually in his favor. “I feel bad for him in a way,” he says, pointing to a flashback in which Joel’s father is seen taking his bar mitzvah money. “A lot of people like playing the villain, so it was fun and I thought that that’s what it was, but then it’s so much more than that. You just keep peeling off layers and there’s something else you didn’t know about him and then another thing you didn’t know about him.”

A fair amount of the show’s appeal can be traced to its exquisite æsthetics, from a pitch-perfect soundtrack to precisely coordinated costumes and a backdrop of steam and neon that captures the romance of midcentury Manhattan. Zegen credits production designer Bill Groom, with whom he had previously worked on HBO’s Twenties gangster epic Boardwalk Empire, for crafting an entire world on the soundstage at the Brooklyn Navy Yard where they film, saving him the task of having to study history for his performance. “It’s all there in the script,” he says. “You walk onto the set of the show and you’re in that time period. So what kind of research do you need to do? You’re surrounded by the cars and they put you in the clothes and the hair and you’re there, you’re in it.”

Another highlight of Mrs. Maisel is its rapid-fire patter, a signature of Sherman-Palladino’s since the nonstop mother-daughter banter of Gilmore Girls, stringing together cultural references, inside jokes, and nonsequiturs at an astonishing rate. “We always get a note where you do a scene and then Amy comes up and she’s like, ‘Pace,'” Zegen laughs. “And it’s like, ‘Are you serious? How do I go any faster than that?’ But you just do it.” Fortunately, the forty-year-old actor can rely on his extensive theater background for support, thanks to parents who would frequently bring him into New York from their home in Ridgewood, New Jersey, to see shows. “I’ve always wanted to be an actor. It was something I’ve wanted since I was a really little kid, like five years old,” he recalls. “I remember asking my parents, ‘Can I audition?’ My parents always took me to theater, whether it was Broadway or children’s theater. I don’t know why I loved it more than my brothers did, because they went to the same shows I did. My mom always tells the story about how they took me—I must’ve been four years old—to see this Alice in Wonderland show on Broadway and they were bored out of their minds, but my mom turned and I was mesmerized.”

Zegen has bounced between stage and screen since the beginning of his career, with an early run on Denis Leary’s firefighter show Rescue Me and, more recently, turns on Boardwalk Empire, The Walking Dead, and Girls and a stint on Broadway in Ivo van Hove’s stark 2015 revival of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge. “They’re very different, different mediums,” he explains of balancing theater and television. “With theater obviously there’s the immediate gratification of it and that’s awesome, but it’s also the most nerve-wracking experience. I don’t think there’s ever a time when I’m not nervous. Before a show, you get those jitters, but that’s why you do it, for that feeling, that high, that buzz. There’s no drug that can offer you that kind of high—well maybe heroin.”

Having recently finished filming The Stand-In opposite Drew Barrymore, Zegen is back in rehearsals for the next season of Mrs. Maisel, the start to a six-month filming process that he says “is hard work, but it’s never boring.” As with the show’s rabid fans, he says he is anxious to discover more about Joel after a cliffhanger of an ending. “This season I get a lot of people tweeting at me like, ‘I’m in love with season two Joel!'” he laughs. “What about season one? What happened? In season three, I’m sure we’re going to find out even more stuff about him that we didn’t know so I love it. I really love this character and I love playing him.”

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is now streaming on Amazon Prime.