Michael Zegen knows you hated Joel at the start of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. But he doesn’t mind—rather, he relished the fact he was the antagonist to Rachel Brosnahan’s Midge.
“As an actor, I love that,” he tells Town & Country. “I saw that as an opportunity, not knowing where he was going. A lot of actors love playing villains, and for all intents and purposes, he was the villain, at least in the first season.”
Joel has had quite the story arc over the four seasons of Maisel: from aspiring comedian cheating on his wife, to resenting Midge's successful career, to working for his father as he figures out what he wants to do, ultimately opening a comedy club and becoming a supportive ex-husband and co-parent.
“You can't really ask for anything better than that as an actor. That’s what everybody wants. They want depth, they want change, they want to see a character evolve. And Joel is no exception,” Zegen says.
At the beginning of season four, we find Joel where we left him in season three: Venturing out on his own to start a comedy club, and stepping up in his support of Midge. He starts dating Mei, portrayed by actress Stephanie Hsu, who described her character to the Hollywood Reporter as “a strong, funny, bilingual Chinese American love interest in 1960s Chinatown.” And he’s still close with his parents, Moishe and Shirley Maisel (Kevin Pollak and Caroline Aaron), who don’t know about his relationship (yet) and are trying to set him up with various young women.
Zegen believes that the families at the core of the show—the Maisels and the Weissmans—are why people keep coming back to Maisel again and again. “You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy this show,” he says. “Family is universal, and something everyone can identify with.”
The actors who star on Maisel have become something of a family themselves over the last five years of filming. During the break between seasons three and four, elongated by the pandemic, the cast would Zoom with each other—and that real life camaraderie can be felt in their performances. “The beautiful thing about the show is that everybody is so talented. And you never have to worry that somebody is not going to bring it,” Zegen says. “The trust surrounding the show is something unparalleled—I've never experienced that kind of trust with anybody.”
Caroline Aaron, who plays Joel's mother, echoed that sentiment, speaking of the love and respect that the Maisel cast has for each other. “He's completely confident with no arrogance,” Aaron says of filming scenes with Zegen. “You always feel safe when you're working with Michael. You’re gonna throw the ball over the net, and he's gonna hit it back to you even better than you hit it to him. But you never feel that there's any arrogance there. He's just so open.”
For Aaron, Zegen is part of her family—on screen and off. “I have a picture of my son and Michael, together because I have two sons,” she says. “That's the way I feel. I really do.”
Aaron adds, “The same way you don’t get to choose your family in real life, you don’t get to choose your fictional family. But boy did I luck out.” In the last two hiatuses between filming, Zegen has returned to the stage in New York, and Aaron has been in the audience, cheering him on. "I can't turn it off," she jokes of playing his mother.
In March 2020, Zegen was wrapping up his run as Ted in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, an off-Broadway musical. The show was a week away from closing when the world shut down. At the time, Zegen didn't mind. He was ready to be done, joking, “I couldn't even fathom doing another week.” Still, he was overjoyed to return to the stage in late 2021 as part of the cast of Trouble in Mind, starring the Tony Award-winning actress LaChanze. Theater, he says, has always been his first love.
“I love live performance, it's probably the hardest medium out of everything—that daily grind, and that weekly grind of doing eight shows a week,” Zegen says. “But there's nothing like live theater. It brings me so much joy—it is the highest high you can get.”
Introducing Trouble in Mind to new audiences was simply “everything” for Zegen. The play, which tells of the experience of what it means to be Black in the theater, remains just as relevant today as when it was written decades ago. It was initially supposed to premiere in 1955, which would've made playwright Alice Childress the first Black woman playwright to have a show on Broadway, but she refused to tone down its message. So, 66 years later, the show made its long-awaited debut. It’s a comedy-drama, and focuses on actress Wiletta Mayer (LaChanze) in rehearsals for an anti-lynching play written by one white man and directed by another (Zegen).
Zegen’s character, the director Al Manners, is one of the antagonists of the show. He is flawed; he wants to emphasize racist stereotypes, and butts heads with Wiletta and the other Black actors. Of course, Zegen's not unfamiliar with playing hated characters; like with Joel, for Al, he tried to instill a sense of humanity into the character.
“I want to make him somebody that people can identify with, so they can understand where he's coming from. So they can maybe hate him, but at the same time, deep down, whether they admit it or not, get where he's coming from. Because, otherwise, it's not going to be that interesting,” Zegen says.
Playing Al, he tried to hold on to those brief moments of humanity. “That feeling you get when people don't like you, it's not necessarily a good feeling,” Zegen says with a laugh. “To relive that every night is going to get old, and make you go crazy. You have to find your moments.”
But the difference between playing the antagonist in a play and on a beloved TV show is extreme; as Zegen explains, “in a play, you've got nowhere to go—you're playing the same thing every night. At least with Joel, he does evolve.” And for viewers, Joel’s evolution has been remarkable to watch.
This is not Zegen’s first long story arc on a TV show; he featured in a recurring role as firefighter Damien Keefe on Rescue Me, appearing in 42 episodes, and as gangster Ben “Bugsby” Siegel in three seasons of Boardwalk Empire. He also had brief stints on Girls and The Walking Dead. But unlike these other roles, playing Joel is “instinctual” for Zegen. His Jewish background helped, he says, to understand the family significance and the sense of humor embedded in Maisel.
His parents couldn't be happier he's starring in this very Jewish show. “They’re able to tell all their friends,” he says with a laugh. But turning serious, he adds, “I have Holocaust survivors in my family, and it means something that I'm on a show about Jews.”
One unexpected outcome of Maisel’s popularity is that Zegen has been asked to do interviews around Holocaust education. Zegen’s maternal grandparents survived the Holocaust, and he grew up hearing stories about his grandmother’s escape. Zegen’s mom was then born in a displaced persons camp in Austria. (Many Holocaust survivors wound up in displaced persons camps once the war ended.) When his mom was 2, her family left the DP camp in Austria and immigrated to America, landing in Brooklyn.
Zegen doesn’t feel like he’s the right person to lead these conversations, but he never says no. “I feel if it's my duty to go out there and teach, then so be it,” he says, referencing recent studies that have shown young people don’t even know what the Holocaust means. One Pew Research Center study from 2020 showed almost two-thirds of American teens do not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and one in ten believe Jews themselves caused the Holocaust.
Education, Zegen says, is not something to be ashamed of; rather, learning is always “something to be proud of.” And if that’s what comes out of starring in Maisel, he’s not complaining. “Obviously, the Nazis didn't win, because I’m on a very popular show about Jewish people.”
He's still in awe of the love that surrounds Maisel—and the worldwide fandom the show has found. He kept his lips sealed on what's to come in season five—which was announced as the final season of Maisel after we spoke—but he did joke that had the pandemic not happened, they’d be filming season six by now.
Now that we’re approaching the second anniversary of the pandemic, Zegen views the arts as a necessary salve, and an escape, especially during these past few years. “It’s about forgetting the real world,” he says. “That’s why I go to plays, or to the movies: to forget about reality for a couple hours.”
But it’s not just to forget—the joy of good theater, or good television, is to get lost in a new world. “The goal is to watch something that makes you think for days on end, for days afterward,” Zegen adds. “Not a lot does that—it’s a very small percentage of film, TV, and stage that actually puts you in that headspace and makes you dwell on it.”
Ultimately, Zegen says, in going to the theater, or turning on the TV, “We want to be moved. We want to learn something about ourselves, about humanity.”
And maybe, just maybe, to laugh a little.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel season four premieres on February 18 on Prime Video.
Emily Burack (she/her) is the news writer for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma, a Jewish culture site. Follow her @emburack on Twitter and Instagram.
