- In full:
- Rachel Elizabeth Brosnahan
Rachel Brosnahan
What role is actress Rachel Brosnahan best known for?
What awards did Rachel Brosnahan win for her role in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel?
Where did Rachel Brosnahan grow up?
What was Rachel Brosnahan’s first film role?
Who did Rachel Brosnahan portray in James Gunn’s Superman (2025)?
Rachel Brosnahan (born July 12, 1990, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.) American actress who is best known for her roles as Lois Lane in James Gunn’s Superman (2025) and as the title character in the Amazon Prime Video series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017–23). Brosnahan won two Golden Globe Awards and an Emmy Award for her performance as Miriam (Midge) Maisel.
Early life
Rachel Brosnahan was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Carol (née Best) and Earl Brosnahan and raised in Highland Park, Illinois, the eldest of three siblings. Her father worked in the publishing industry. Brosnahan had an early interest in acting, performing in school plays and musicals. She also took part in sports, including lacrosse and wrestling, and she was a certified snowboarding instructor. While still in high school, Brosnahan landed her first film role, that of Lisa in David S. Goyer’s 2009 supernatural horror film The Unborn, which starred Gary Oldman and was produced by Michael Bay. Brosnahan graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2012.
Acting career
During college Brosnahan began racking up small acting roles, including guest parts in episodes of the popular TV series Gossip Girl (2007–12), The Good Wife (2009–16), CSI: Miami (2002–12), and Grey’s Anatomy (2005– ). Her big break came in 2013 when she was cast in the Netflix streaming series House of Cards, in which she played Rachel Posner, a high-end Washington, D.C., escort. Although the role was initially small, the show’s creators were so impressed with Brosnahan that they expanded the character into a recurring part from 2013 to 2015, for which she earned her first Emmy nomination in 2015—outstanding guest actress in a drama series. In 2014–15, Brosnahan portrayed the young wife of a Los Alamos scientist in the period drama Manhattan, about the atomic bomb project. In 2016 she appeared in Patriots Day, a true-crime thriller about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and its aftermath, alongside Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Monaghan.
Brosnahan’s breakthrough role was that of 1950s Jewish housewife turned stand-up comic Miriam (Midge) Maisel in the Amazon Prime Video series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017–23). Her energetic and emotional performance as an upper-class New Yorker who turns to comedy after her marriage fails was critically acclaimed and earned her two Golden Globe Awards (2018, 2019), an Emmy Award (2018), and three Screen Actors Guild Awards (2019 [two awards], 2020).
Brosnahan continued to appear regularly in films during the 2020s. In 2022 she acted alongside Christoph Waltz and Willem Dafoe in the western thriller Dead for a Dollar, in which she played a businessman’s missing wife who is being sought by a bounty hunter (Waltz). In 2025 Brosnahan portrayed Sarah, the wife of a CIA decoder (Rami Malek) whose murder prompts her husband to seek revenge in The Amateur. Later that year she took on the iconic role of reporter Lois Lane opposite David Corenswet’s Superman in James Gunn’s reimagining of the classic comic book hero. Brosnahan’s portrayal of the headstrong love interest brought her popular and critical acclaim, with some calling the movie the best adaptation of the decades-old character to date. She was cast as the lead in the second season of the legal drama Presumed Innocent on Apple TV, which began filming in 2025.
In addition to her work in Hollywood, Brosnahan has appeared in such theater productions as Up (2009) at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, The Big Knife in her Broadway debut (2013), and a revival of The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (2023), opposite Oscar Isaac, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Other projects and personal life
While working in New York, Brosnahan lived for a while with her father’s sister, the fashion designer Kate Spade, with whom she was close. Spade died in June 2018. In 2025 it was announced that Brosnahan would make her feature directorial debut with a documentary about her aunt.
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In 2020 Brosnahan launched the production company Scrap Paper Pictures, which develops and produces content across genres and media, including film, television, audio, and theater. She has been married to actor Jason Ralph since June 2016.