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TV
Michael Zegen in a
scene from Mrs. Maisel
Michael Zegen
Tells All
Spoiler alert: The actor who plays Midge’s
husband tells some secrets, including some
plot twists in Season 2 of Mrs. Maisel.
GERRI MILLER
JEWISH JOURNAL
OF GREATER L.A.
28
December 20 • 2018
jn
M
ichael Zegen has played good guys (Rescue
Me, Girls), a gangster (Boardwalk Empire)
and a zombie (The Walking Dead), but in
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, he has his juiciest — and
most personal — role to date.
In the Emmy-winning, 1950s-set series, now
streaming its second season on Amazon Prime
Video, Zegen plays Miriam “Midge” Maisel’s (Rachel
Brosnahan) estranged husband, Joel, whose extra-
marital indiscretion fueled her quest for indepen-
dence via a career in stand-up comedy. This season,
audiences will see a newly assertive side of Joel as he
takes charge of his family’s dress company and claps
back at Catskills gossips.
“He’s trying to find his own career path because
nothing else has worked out. He’s being a responsible
adult. That’s where he’s headed. Hopefully, he keeps
it up,” Zegen says. “I love the fact that he’s not just a
one-note villain or antagonist. He’s got a lot of depth
to him. He’s real and he’s funny. That’s why I love
playing him. When I first read the script, I knew that
it was something I had to do. I knew this guy and
how to play him. And I’m really fortunate that they
chose me to do it.”
The fact that the show reflects the Jewish experi-
ence was another lure. “It really hits home for me,”
Zegen says. “Even though I’m not from the 1950s, I
understood this world. I come from a family of Jews
and Holocaust survivors and it’s important to tell
these stories. The show is about a Jewish family, but
it’s universal. The fact that so many people of differ-
ent ethnicities have fallen in love with it is incredibly
important to me.”
Several episodes are set in a summer resort in the
Catskill Mountains and, while Zegen hadn’t been
there previously, “my mother spent summers in the
Catskills and told me about it,” he said. “We have
home videos and it looks exactly like the place we
filmed at.”
The series’ family dinner scenes and depictions
of holiday traditions are quite familiar to Zegen,
who grew up in a Conservative Jewish home in
Ridgewood, N.J.
As the grandson of Ukrainian and Polish Holocaust
survivors on his mother’s side, Zegen “grew up learn-
ing about the Holocaust. My grandma told me many
stories about escaping. It was ingrained in my head
from a very early age never to let something like that
happen again, and that it’s important to pass on our
traditions,” he says. “Whether I go to temple or not, I
still celebrate the holidays.”
This season, Joel and Midge navigate the parame-