This season, viewers meet another of Susie’s walking wounds: a character named Hedy (Nina Arianda), who shattered Susie’s heart back in college. Years later, she reemerges as the wife of the late-night host Midge is working for. “What promises can we make at 22?” Hedy says when confronted by Susie about leaving her in the lurch decades earlier. Much has been made about Susie’s sexuality not being addressed sooner in the series, but “I think a lot of people got it wrong,” Borstein says. “Susie would not—even if she was a good old-fashioned vanilla heterosexual woman, so to speak, she wouldn’t have shared that [side of her], either.”
Susie’s detachment from her emotions is the biggest difference between her and the woman who plays her. Borstein explains, “Susie says it in the pilot episode that she doesn’t mind being alone, but she just can’t accept being insignificant. I also don’t want to be insignificant, but I also can’t be alone. We’re different creatures that way,” she says, adding, “But absolutely, knowing what it feels like to have thought you had a future with someone and for that to be pulled out from underneath you—of course I knew what that felt like.”
When Borstein—alongside Barcelona musicians Eric Mills and Salva Rey—began work on her first comedy special, she knew there was one pesky life event that couldn’t be avoided. “I’ve never really even talked about being divorced. There’s a lot of people that had no idea I was divorced. It just kind of very quietly happened. So that was a little nerve-wracking, even just acknowledging that in a public forum,” she says of her 2014 split from Gilmore Girls actor Jackson Douglas, which was finalized in 2017. “But what I want to share is not really about the divorce, but about the rebirth: having a mulligan, having a do-over in life. It’s rare.”
The result is Corsets & Clownsuits, Borstein’s “deeply personal and wildly fictitious” special released last month on Prime Video. Borstein savored the synergy between Maisel and the special, which she filmed on one of the series’s sets. “It’s kind of like having people who believe in past lives or future lives,” she says, trailing off. “It maybe was ripe and perfect because Maisel was coming to that close, and this could use up the nutrients and open up.”
Borstein is bitingly candid in the special about the aftermath of her and Douglas’s breakup, including alimony checks (“He divorced me, and now I have to pay him”) and continuing to wear her engagement ring (“First of all, I paid for it”). She sails from the overturning of Roe v. Wade (“I came out of a 20-year marriage with fewer rights than I went in”) to her disastrous first post-divorce hookup with a magician. At one point, a phallic neon green sticker adorns her cheek (I won’t spoil why). Borstein then turns to her father in the audience: “Are you proud there’s a cock on your daughter’s face?”
In a recent interview with Marc Maron, Borstein argued that “comedy is persuasion.” When I ask who she was trying to influence with the special, she says: “Well, first of all, I think I was persuading myself. The special is about a woman struggling to figure out how she wants to be perceived. And really, the act of doing the special did away with all that. I didn’t care how I was perceived.” But if there’s another young person who can learn from her life, so be it. “It’s not like I wanted to make a public service announcement. But there’s moments in the show where I share shit that took me 40 years to learn. Why not give someone a shortcut?”
Reclaiming that fear of perception includes finally watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which Borstein has avoided doing thus far. “After the last episode drops, my plan is to sit with my 10-year-old daughter and watch it from beginning to end,” she says. “That’s when it’ll probably really sink in—like, ‘Wow, we made this? How the hell did this even happen?’” It also means appreciating the way her heartbreak made her performance richer. “You’ve got a bag of tricks and emotions and past experiences, and all you can do is reach into your own bag,” Borstein says when asked about playing Susie’s scenes with Hedy. “So that’s what’s in my bag—my divorce, finding a person and then losing a person, having children.”
Watching the special, one can’t help but feel that the possibilities are infinite for Borstein—she could write a musical, host a late-night show. Does she feel that creative freedom? “Prime Video did something funky on the homepage [for the special]. It says ‘episode one’ for some reason. I think it’s just a glitch,” Borstein explains. “So a lot of people are like, ‘I can’t wait for the second episode.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, no. Wait, there’s just this one.’” And yet. “It does lead me to think about, ‘Do I have another story to tell?’” Borstein says. “And I think I do.”