Actor Luke Kirby won an Emmy in 2019 for playing the legendary comedian.
Luke Kirby's Emmy-winning portrayal of Lenny Bruce on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has introduced a whole new generation of viewers to the legendary comedian.
As a friend, champion and, as of season 4's finale, paramour of Rachel Brosnahan's titular character -- a housewife who divorces her husband and pursues a career in standup comedy in the late 1950s -- Kirby's Bruce has served as a historical barometer of sorts for the show, offering context to the political and comedic landscape of the time.
However, Maisel has been careful about keeping Lenny to the sidelines of Midge's story, so much so that Kirby's 2019 Emmy win was for Outstanding Guest Actor on a Comedy Series, not for a supporting role.
"I think the thing with the character of Lenny that [series creator Amy Sherman-Palladino] and them had to be really careful when they presented him from season to season, it's certainly an exercise in less being more and leave people wanting more," Kirby shared with ET of his portrayal. "I'd be happy to, you know, bludgeon people over the head with it -- but this is a good lesson in nuance and keeping it classy."
So, what exactly of Maisel's Lenny is fact and what's fiction? Read on to learn about the real-life truths that inspired the compelling performance.
THE REAL MRS. MAISEL?
While Lenny and Midge’s mutual admiration finally crossed the line into a romantic night together in Maisel’s season 4 finale, there is obviously no real-life Midge Maisel that Bruce knew or had any kind of relationship with.
In real life, the comedian married stripper and showgirl Honey Harlow in 1951. The pair had a tumultuous relationship plagued by drug use and domestic incidents, and were on and off again throughout the rest of Bruce's life.
The couple's daughter, Kitty Bruce -- Lenny's only child -- was born in 1955, and Kirby said it was "amazing" to actually meet the comic's real-life daughter and get her blessing for the character.
"Obviously, there's the concern that people are going to, you know, hate your interpretation and all of the stuff that comes with this job, but because he's a real person who had a real family and had a daughter, she was the one that I would have felt really bad if we'd done something to upset her," he shared. "So, I'm glad to know that wasn't the case."
At the time of Bruce's death in 1966, he was engaged to Lotus Weinstock, a comedian and fixture in the New York City nightclub scene of the '60s. Despite the dearth of women in comedy at the time, Weinstock made a name for herself, even appearing on popular talk shows like The Tonight Show, The Merv Griffin Show and more. While series creator Sherman-Palladino has insisted that the character of Midge is not directly modeled off of any real-life figure -- admitting some milestones for the character parallel Joan Rivers' iconic career -- perhaps Weinstock was something of an inspiration for the romantic tension between Midge and Lenny?
FAVORITE HAUNTS AND FAMOUS BITS
Lenny and Midge first meet at The Gaslight Café, a comedy spoken word club that was a real-life fixture in Greenwich until it closed its doors in 1971. First opened as a Prohibition-era speakeasy, the club was a favorite of Bob Dylan, and poets like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso and Bob Kaufman all took the stage in its heyday.
The pair also take in a show at The Village Vanguard -- a jazz club that boasted performances from the likes of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Anita O'Day, Charlie Mingus, Bill Evans and more -- which remains a Greenwich mainstay to this day.
When it comes to some of Bruce's most famous performances, Maisel also stayed extremely faithful to real-life events. Bruce did appear on The Steve Allen Show in April 1959 -- one of only six televised performances the comic gave in his short-lived career -- and Kirby's performance of his iconic "All Alone" monologue in the season 2 finale is almost a shot-for-shot recreation.
Another of Bruce's most memorable performances is also captured on the show, in the season 4 finale. The comic took the stage for a legendary show at Carnegie Hall in the midst of a city-stopping blizzard on Feb. 4, 1961. His set was recorded and later released as a three-disc set, The Carnegie Hall Concert.
LEGAL TROUBLES
Lenny’s storylines on Maisel have been book-ended by his legal troubles, which plagued the comic throughout his professional life. Midge first meets the comic in the show’s pilot, when the pair end up in the back of the same police car, both being arrested for obscenity after controversial stand-up shows -- Lenny for the usual reasons, Midge because she was onstage in her nightie.
The next morning, as they get bailed out, Midge asks Lenny if he really loves comedy. He responds that if there was any other job in the world that he could do, he’d do it. But it’s comedy or nothing. It may not be a direct quote, but Lenny's monologue on the show is evidence of his love of -- or, at the very least, devotion to -- his craft.
The only sighting of Lenny in the first three episodes of Maisel season 5 -- which were released on Friday -- is when he and Midge run into each other at the airport. He's headed to California, with a briefcase full of documents from his lawyers and a cynical outlook on the sunny West Coast.
In real life, Bruce spent plenty of time in handcuffs for his comedy act. He was arrested multiple times in the early '60s on charges of obscenity, following the use of profanity in his on-stage acts. After two performances at Greenwich's Cafe Au Go Go in April 1964, Bruce was found guilty of obscenity following a six-month trial in Manhattan. He was sentenced to four months in a workhouse on Dec. 21, 1964, but was set free on bail during the appeals process and died before the appeal was decided. Howard Solomon, the owner of the Cafe Au Go Go, later saw Bruce's conviction overturned.
The legal troubles increased Bruce's reputation, but ultimately harmed his career -- many nightclubs and television shows would blacklist the performer in his later years due to fear of prosecution.
MATTERS OF SUBSTANCE
A season 4 episode where Midge finds Lenny passed out on a New York City sidewalk is the first that Maisel hints at Bruce’s well-documented issues with drugs. It’s later made explicit when Midge finds paraphernalia in Lenny’s bag after the two hook up following his Carnegie Hall gig -- but he's quick to brush off her concern.
In real life, Bruce's problem was a serious one. Over the last decade of his life he was a daily user of heroin, methamphetamine and Dilaudid, which ultimately led to his death on Aug. 3, 1966. The comedian was found dead in the bathroom of his Hollywood Hills home, with drug paraphernalia at the scene. His official cause of death was later determined to be "acute morphine poisoning caused by an overdose."
Writer Dick Schaap memorialized Bruce in Playboy, concluding his eulogy with the words: "One last four-letter word for Lenny: Dead. At forty. That's obscene."
Maisel's final season flashes forward all the way to 2005, however, Lenny's death is never addressed on screen. The last we see of him is onstage in San Francisco in 1965, though he spends most of the time discussing his legal issues. Backstage, Susie tries to reason with him, but he's "a mess," and Midge can't even bring herself to have one last conversation.
Sherman-Palladino told ET that not addressing Bruce's death on screen was an intentional choice the show made from the beginning.
"Everybody knows what happened to Lenny Bruce," she explained. "Everybody knows. We knew from the first time we met him in the pilot where he ends up. So it felt like [we shouldn't do it], other than to give Rachel a great crying scene. Because she's a great crier, among other things."
The writer and producer noted that her fictionalized version of Bruce was meant to serve as "a little bit of a guardian angel" for Midge in the show. The series wasn't about his story, but how his life and professional legacy impacted her own.
"He was a supporter, he was a muse," she shared. "And even when they slipped into a moment of romance, that romance was broken immediately with, 'Get your sh*t together, get your a** back onstage. Why are you hiding? Why are you blowing this?'"
"It felt more important to see his decline and her to see that, because he also represented the bad side of the business, the place that you can go when you don't pay attention and you're not careful and you're not eye on the prize all the time," she continued. "He was the ultimate good and the ultimate bad lesson for Midge."
It was also important to the Maisel creative team, Sherman-Palladino noted, to honor not just what Lenny meant to Midge, but his impact "in the grand scheme of comedy and what he represented to the comedy world."
"He was the guy that broke down those doors. He was the first guy to walk through them, and get hit for it," she said.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is streaming now on Prime Video.
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