Rachel Brosnahan steps into something new in ‘I’m Your Woman’

Hello! I’m Mark Olsen and welcome to the newsletter companion to “The Envelope: The Podcast,” where my co-host Yvonne Villarreal and I bring you highlights from each week’s episode.

As we mentioned last week, the Sundance Film Festival begins this Thursday, Jan. 28. Jen Yamato spoke to Tabitha Jackson, the new director of the festival, about the challenges of reimagining the event for a world still gripped by a pandemic.

“The first question, given the pandemic, was: ‘Should we even be doing the festival?’” Jackson said. “The answer very quickly was, ‘Yes.’ If we believe in the role of artists, the independent voice and community, then a film festival is not a bauble or a distraction or a frivolity. It’s actually a necessary coming together, in whatever way is safe, to make sense of the moment.”

For this week’s podcast, I spoke to Rachel Brosnahan, star of the dramatic action thriller “I’m Your Woman,” streaming now on Amazon Prime Video. Though best known for her Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning performance as late 1950s/early 1960s New York City housewife turned stand-up comedian Midge Maisel, Brosnahan takes on quite a different role in the new film.

Directed by Julia Hart, who co-wrote the script with producer (and husband) Jordan Horowitz, “I’m Your Woman” is a 1970s-set crime thriller that places its focus on characters usually left in the margins. Brosnahan plays Jean, a woman whose low-level criminal husband arrives home one day with a baby. He disappears soon after, and Jean is left to navigate the world on her own.

As Brosnahan said, “I got to run in platform heels down a really rickety old staircase and crawl on the floor in pools of fake blood and run into people and drag 200-pound men out of cars and slide around in a 1970s sedan, you know? I got to learn how to shoot a gun. It was good fun.”

As Justin Chang put it in his review of the film for The Times, “It would be hard to imagine a more dramatic departure for Brosnahan from her Emmy-winning turn in ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,’ in which she gave us the 1950s New York housewife as blithely overconfident motormouth. In ‘I’m Your Woman,’ she doesn’t just vanish behind long blond tresses and those big, moody shades. She shows us a woman confronting moment-to-moment terror for the first time — and discovering, in that confrontation, a resourcefulness and sheer nerve that she never knew she possessed.”

Thanks for reading/listening/subscribing. We have lots more to come. Upcoming guests include Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini for “Dead to Me,” Josh O’Connor for “The Crown,” Steve McQueen for “Small Axe” and Shaka King for “Judas and the Black Messiah.”

Listen to the podcast here and subscribe to “The Envelope: The Podcast” on Apple Podcasts or your podcast app of choice.