Doesn’t it feel rare to see an actor become a star before our very eyes? That’s partially a product of our time: name actors who sell overseas have been name actors for decades. Sons and daughters of names get into the business with ease. Younger up-and-comers get more opportunities if they also happen to have a really excellent social-media presence. And in the rare moments when we fall for a Jennifer Lawrence or an Oscar Isaac in a great movie, their lives are quickly signed away to the demands of tentpole movies and existing IP.

All that is why it’s truly a pleasure to see a young actress take on something that could be a signature role. This sense of discovery fuels Amy Sherman-Palladino’s delightful new pilot, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, starring the wonderful Rachel Brosnahan as Miriam “Midge” Maisel.

Now streaming on Amazon as part of its spring pilot season, Mrs. Maisel is the story of a 1950s housewife who thinks that her life is all figured out—until she discovers a talent for standup comedy. Brosnahan takes on Sherman-Palladino’s zippy dialogue with ease, whether it’s a toast at her own wedding, wheedling at the butcher shop, or making her debut on a grimy Greenwich village stage. Even though some of the inflections and story beat may seem familiar to fans of Sherman-Palladino’s generation-shaping WB classic turned Netflix mainstay Gilmore Girls, Brosnahan builds a fascinating woman in the span of a pilot.

Brosnahan, a twenty-six-year-old native of Chicago’s North Shore, has been working steadily since she graduated from New York University. “I can finally say I’m a professional actress,” she recently told Vanity Fair over the phone. “This is my job now.” She was cast in Maisel while playing Desdemona in an off-Broadway production of Othello, helmed by another rising star (Sam Gold) and starring Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo: “It was a blessing to be preparing Shakespeare and preparing for this show at the same time, as they both felt like slightly different languages.”

Brosnahan’s road to Maisel started with her guest role on the Netflix political drama House of Cards, where she played young prostitute Rachel Posner. Initially booked for two episodes and five lines, she caught showrunner Beau Williamson’s eye; soon, Posner was developed into a major character that you could care about. Brosnahan got an Emmy nomination for guest actor in the process, and began booking roles big and small in both TV and film.

While it could be easy for Brosnahan to coast on the determined jut of her can-do chin and her glossy auburn hair, she has a particular chameleon-like quality that lets her disappear into a multitude of different roles, whether she’s embodying women from the past or the present. She was superb as a naïve scientist’s wife in the worth-seeking-out show Manhattan, which lasted for two seasons on WGN America (and is now available on Hulu). She had gigantic hair in the Mark Burnett CBS miniseries The Dovekeepers. She also played a lead role in Woody Allen’s Amazon show Crisis in Six Scenes. Some of her smaller parts included stealing Joachim Trier’s Louder Than Bombs, a film about a family of men grieving a ghostly Isabelle Huppert, and breaking your heart in a small role with a sterling Maine accent in Lisa Cholodenko’s masterpiece HBO miniseries Olive Kitteridge. Brosnahan also appeared in last year’s Mark Wahlberg docu-drama Patriots Day as Jessica Kensky, a young newlywed who lost her left leg in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.