The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel star Rachel Brosnahan has admitted that she gets stress dreams related to learning her dialogue for the series. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is a series which tells the tale of a housewife in 1958 who decides to become a stand-up comic after she is left suddenly by her cheating husband. The series has been streaming as an Amazon Prime original since 2017, and has found massive success with audiences and critics alike, wining a whopping 20 Primetime Emmys.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is created by Amy Sherman-Palladino, who is a writer particularly known for her very fast-paced dialogue. In fact, Sherman-Palladino's other successful series, Gilmore Girls, is known for cramming nearly twice the amount of dialogue of a normal one-hour drama into its episodes. While most one-hour shows average about 100 words per minute, Gilmore Girls averages about 186 words per minute. This is a trend that Sherman-Palladino has continued in Mrs.
“[We] have tons of dialogue and we don’t always have a lot of time to memorize it. So, I find that if I learn lines too late at night — I do that terrible thing where you sleep with the script on your chest — then I start running lines in my dreams, and so I start having stress dreams.” Brosnahan went on to state that she will dream that she is onstage delivering her lines and will forget one. The actress likened the feeling to the classic dream of realizing one is naked in front of many people, except in Brosnahan's case, all her teeth fall out. This is a terrifying image, and certainly a very frightening dream, but also very understandable for someone in Brosnahan's situation. As the series lead, she is responsible for a huge chunk of the fast paced dialogue on Mrs.
Despite the immense pressure on Brosnahan, it can't be denied that her hard work has paid off. Brosnahan has and continues to receive great critical acclaim for her performance in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, winning both an Emmy and a Golden Globe for her work on the series. Brosnahan continues to impress fans of the show in Mrs. Maisel season four which began streaming on Amazon on February 18th. Sadly, it has been announced that Mrs. Maisel will be ending after its fifth season.