The role Rachel Brosnahan will always remember never playing: “I sobbed”
In 2025 alone, Rachel Bronahan is just off the back of playing Lois Lane in the most recent Superman adaptation, starring as the wife of a CIA analyst in The Amateur, and has been announced as the lead in a new Apple TV+ anthology series.
It’s safe to say she might be at the height of her career so far, but, as with most actors, it didn’t always go to plan.
While she might have graduated from the Tisch School of the Arts and landed small roles for big names early on, there’s one missed opportunity that still haunts her. After graduation, as she was rooming with three friends in a two-bed flat in Chelsea, New York, she came across a role that piqued her interest so much that she flew to LA on her own dime to audition. It was for Gus Van Sant’s twee independent film, Restless.
The role ultimately went to indie darling Mia Wasikowska. “I sobbed,” Brosnahan admitted to Town and Country Magazine, “All over New York”. She’s one of those people who find walking around the vast city comforting when she’s sad. Ironically, this sounds perfectly befitting of a character in the film, which follows the story of a teenage orphan who befriends a young dying woman he meets at one of the funerals he frequents to cope with the death of his parents.
However, it might have actually been a near-miss instead of a missed chance. Despite Van Sant’s previous successes like My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting and Milk, and its release at the height of the Tumblr-indie-film fever pitch, Restless didn’t cause much fanfare. Now it is but a footnote in the annals of indie culture.
On the flip side, Brosnahan has gone on to garner much better acclaim. A few years after the unlucky audition, she was cast in a two-episode part in Netflix’s House of Cards. Her portrayal of the originally nameless sex worker, Rachel Posner, caught the attention of a showrunner and her part was expanded significantly, and she ended up coming away with her first Emmy nomination.
Despite her recent success playing the wives or girlfriends of leading men, her breakthrough role came in the form of the divorced, ahead-of-her-time comedian, Midge, in The Marvelous Mrs Maisel. Created by Amy Sherman-Palladino of Gilmore Girls fame, Mrs Maisel caught the attention of the same kinds of audiences and made Brosnahan, if not a household name, a household face.
Running for five seasons, it set her in good standing to pursue whatever kind of career she wanted in acting, whether continuing in the prestige comedy trajectory or striking out on her own. She chose the latter, and here we are. So while some missed opportunities haunt huge actors for years, Brosnahan might look back with gratitude that she didn’t become the stereotypical manic-pixie-dream-girl in Restless.
