(Warning: This post contains major spoilers for the Season 2 finale of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”)
Midge Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) made a giant choice at the end of the second season of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” A couple of big decisions, actually. But one is truly more of a twist than the other.
For starters, she is going all in on standup now, taking off on tour with Shy Baldwin, which means leaving her family and would-have-been fiance Benjamin (Zachary Levi). And second, and even more shockingly, she went back to her ex Joel (Michael Zegen) — the husband who left her for his secretary in Season 1 — for a one-night stand in the closing moments of the episode, saying she didn’t want to be alone before she left. And he sealed that proposition with a kiss.
TheWrap sat down with Levi to ask the Amazon Prime Video star about why he thinks Midge made these choices.
“Well, seemingly, she was doing everything she could to live the perfect life,” Levi says in the interview above. “Like, literally, you know, that was what drove her down to measuring herself and being the perfect wife, the perfect wife, the perfect wife. And she did everything and that still ended in Joel leaving. Not her leaving him, him leaving her.”
“And that, I think, when somebody feels like they’re doing everything by the book and that still doesn’t work that means the book kind of crumbles,” he continued. “And then while the book is crumbling, for her to find standup and find seemingly kind of what I think she feels to be her absolute purpose in the world, no matter what you find outside of that, you feel like you might be losing yourself again to not travel down the road that you have found now.”
Levi says “no matter how good Ben might look on paper or even coming back to Joel might look on paper” Midge has a journey she thinks she needs to follow now, adding: “I mean, obviously, from Ben’s point of view it’s like, ‘Look, I’d still support you in that. I don’t know why you gotta…’ But I think that flipped something in her like, ‘I don’t want to drag him through whatever the rest of this is and I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure out who I am.’”
As for why Midge went to Joel, Levi believes it was for exactly the reason she said: “She just didn’t want to be alone right then.”
But what that means for Ben in Season 3, Levi says he has “no idea.”
“I would be delighted if I got to go back and reprise my role of Benjamin on the show to wrap it up or keep it going or, you know, have a spot here and then a season later come back again, you know, in the same way that other great guest stars on other shows kind of keep circling back into people’s lives,” he says. “It’s an incredible sandbox to play in and those are the only sandboxes I want to play in, the really awesome, excellent ones.”
Watch the interview above.
“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” Season 2 is streaming now on Prime Video.