NEW YORK — Rachel Brosnahan doesn’t back down from a pressing question. Perceptive follow-ups are fair game. Generally, she embraces curiosity. As the “Superman” actress settles in for a mid-June interview over lunch at the Crosby Bar in SoHo, the conversation includes all of the above — but she’s the one doing the asking.

Portraying ace reporter Lois Lane left Brosnahan with queries of her own about the media. After interviewing numerous journalists to prepare for the part, she isn’t about to squander an opportunity for a good old-fashioned inquisition.

She wonders: What drove me toward print journalism rather than broadcast? Then: “Were you somebody who was like ‘I want to do this because I love it’ or ‘because I want to make a difference in the world’?” What’s the strangest place I’ve gotten a call from a source? Eventually, Brosnahan concedes that she’s the one here to be grilled. “I promise,” she says, “that this is my last interview question for you.” (It isn’t.)

On July 11, the “Superman” franchise returned to movie theaters with an optimistic, retro-coded spin on the character (played by David Corenswet) meant to jump-start a new on-screen DC Comics universe. It’s stuffed with standbys from Superman’s Ben-Day dot glory days: the Fortress of Solitude; Krypto the Superdog; Metropolis and the people who live there, including that plucky heroine who can melt the Man of Steel …

… and who is, first things first, a reporter.

“I would have thought they found a real journalist and cast her as Lois Lane,” says Skyler Gisondo, who plays upstart photographer Jimmy Olsen. For Brosnahan, “the thing that was so important to her to get right — and that I think she nailed — was the sense of responsibility toward shining light on the truth.”

Says Wendell Pierce, who portrays Daily Planet editor Perry White: “Adaptable, reactive, curious, involved, festive, inquiring: All of those things come to mind in her portrayal of Lois. I have friends who are journalists, and she really captured that.”

The surreal experience of being interviewed by Lois Lane herself merely ratifies what was clear the moment Brosnahan’s casting was announced: The 34-year-old is an uncanny fit for an iconic character.

Exceptional as a Los Alamos, N.M., housewife on “Manhattan,” a prostitute navigating the political cesspool of “House of Cards” and (most famously) a midcentury stand-up in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” Brosnahan uses timeless appeal and chameleonic verve to disappear into her characters. Brassy or muted, petrified or self-possessed — wherever a role takes her, the actress seems at home.

“She’s so beautiful, and she’s got that skin that glows. It’s like she swallowed a light bulb,” says “Maisel” creator Amy Sherman-Palladino. “She could just coast on that. But she’s just so versatile and so good. Anyone who doesn’t know her, they need to know her, because I just think she’s our Meryl Streep of the future.”

Brosnahan’s portrayal of the whip-smart Midge Maisel earned her an Emmy, two Golden Globes and three Screen Actors Guild Awards. “Superman” is an entirely different undertaking, especially as filmmaker James Gunn — with his signature wit and zip—- seeks to reverse not only DC Comics’ cinematic fortunes, but also perhaps America’s superhero fatigue writ large.

It sounds like a job for someone super. But also someone marvelous.

A dramatic actress at heart, Brosnahan says it still “breaks my brain” that she’s best known for playing a comedian. And yet: She’s a banter machine.

Sporting a nondescript ball cap, Brosnahan arrives for lunch on this sunny day and promptly quips about her complexion.

“I’m far too see-through for outside,” she says. “I’m an embarrassment at the beach. I’m not voluntarily going, but if we are going, I’m in long sleeves and the largest hat you can find, and my face is white from the zinc.” She hunts for a breakfast menu, then chuckles: “If I haven’t eaten eggs or cereal, the day isn’t right. It doesn’t matter what time it is.”

Between her nocturnal tendencies and self-described translucence, her dream role won’t shock you: “Someone make me a vampire, I beg of you.”

Brosnahan has long cherished the fantastical. A “weird, sort of shy kid” growing up in the Chicago suburbs, she ventured to Middle-earth, Narnia and other realms when she couldn’t make sense of her own. Comics? She preferred “Archie,” “Garfield” and “The Adventures of Tintin.” She wasn’t particularly fond of superhero stories — until around age 12, when her father showed her Richard Donner’s “Superman.”

“It’s one of the first love stories I can remember,” Brosnahan says of the 1978 film starring Christopher Reeve as Superman and Margot Kidder as Lois. “And that scene of them flying? The movie really holds up.”

When Brosnahan got word that Gunn, the new co-head of DC Studios, was writing and directing a fresh take on Superman, the opportunity to join the comic book house’s rebooted continuity intrigued an actress with a knack for boarding towering undertakings on the ground floor. (She joined “House of Cards” at the start of the streaming era, and headlined “Maisel” just as Amazon Studios was ramping up.) The audition script — an early version of a scene in which Lois interviews Superman — left her eager to fuel the characters’ combustible dynamic.

Eventually, Brosnahan was among three actresses chosen for screen tests alongside a trio of Superman contenders. At this point, Brosnahan got to see Gunn’s full script, sent via an “exploding link” that — she realized only after opening it on her iPhone — could be used once on a single device.

“And if you screenshot it,” Brosnahan says, “someone’s going to show up at your front door and arrest you and throw you into a well with a cage over the top.”

Appearing on Broadway at the time in “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” Brosnahan took a seat outside the theater, squinted and scrolled through Gunn’s “Superman” for the first time. Soon after, she embarked on a nightmarish day of flight delays, cancellations, rebookings and jaunts across John F. Kennedy International Airport on a whirlwind trip to Los Angeles for a tryout.

Describing Brosnahan’s test, Gunn says she popped on her own. But it was when she got in the room with Corenswet that he knew he had his duo.

“There was this extra spark of chemistry that you can’t explain, but definitely exists,” Gunn writes in an email. “Rachel and David had it instantly.”

Saying goodbye to Corenswet on her way out, Brosnahan got a glimpse of the actor trying on the red-and-blue tights.

“I just looked in the room,” she recalls, “and was like, ‘There’s Superman.’”

Brosnahan was shopping at a boutique near our lunch spot, shortly after the “Maisel” series finale aired in May 2023, when Gunn called to offer her the part.

“Ye olde Aritzia, right around the corner,” Brosnahan says with an air of faux-nostalgia. “I was in a bathroom that had three stalls in it, and I couldn’t go in the hallway because there was a line of people wrapped around the corner, and it felt like a sensitive call. So I was just standing by the sink praying that one of the other two toilets didn’t flush behind me — and that there wasn’t, like, a journalist in the stall.”

Gunn’s take on Lois — a Pulitzer winner with a tumultuous past —- has the character sparring with Superman over his faith in humanity’s inherent goodness. Where Superman trusts, Lois questions. In the final version of that interview scene, Lois presses the last son of Krypton on the unintended consequences of his actions. Habitually gnawing at her pen, Brosnahan lends Lois the kind of disarming charm that makes her matter-of-fact interrogation all the more penetrating.

Describing her Lois, Brosnahan emphasizes hunger, ambition and a thirst for the truth — qualities, she acknowledges, that she shares. Then there’s that inquisitive side.

“Rachel has a thousand questions about her character, which is something that some people might not appreciate,” Gunn says, “but I really love because it shows her commitment.”

Chat with Brosnahan for a few minutes, and it’s apparent that she brought plenty of herself to Midge Maisel: the comic timing, the self-aware shtick, the chatty conversation. So when Brosnahan posits that she has even more in common with Lois, it’s a striking statement.

“The scariest part about this project is that she feels the closest to myself I’ve ever played,” Brosnahan says. “Not in all the ways. I hesitate to say that, because I feel like that’s so easily taken out of context. We are not the same. But I get so many different parts of her, and was a little intimidated by that.”

Just how similar, though? Lois is sometimes depicted as a spunky Midwesterner who heads to Metropolis to pursue her journalistic dreams. Created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, she premiered with Superman in 1938’s Action Comics No. 1 and has been a DC Comics staple ever since — newsroom rival to Clark Kent, earthly tether to the alien Superman, rarely a damsel in distress.

After growing up in Highland Park, Ill., with two siblings, Brosnahan left her own Midwestern comfort zone to study acting at New York University. Early on, she booked bit parts in movies such as David S. Goyer’s “The Unborn” and the gothic fantasy “Beautiful Creatures,” and she starred opposite Bernadette Peters in the indie two-hander “Coming Up Roses.” On TV, she popped up in single episodes of “The Good Wife,” “CSI: Miami,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and more.

Michael Kelly, who played the lethally effective aide Doug Stamper on “House of Cards,” was staggered by Brosnahan’s poise when they first worked together on the show’s 2013 pilot. Initially envisioned as a one-off, Brosnahan’s role ultimately yielded three seasons of appearances and her first Emmy nomination. As her primary scene partner, Kelly admired how she waded through the unspoken in those tension-soaked moments.

“You had to communicate and give feelings and give emotions and responses sometimes without talking,” Kelly says. “She’s a fantastic listener, and that’s more than half of acting, in my opinion.”

Like many “House of Cards” figures, Brosnahan’s character met a grisly end.

“I was a dier and a crier only,” she observes, “for the first couple of years.” She’s not wrong. On “The Blacklist,” she played an on-the-lam felon who ends up buried in the woods. Her character in 2014’s “Olive Kitteridge” endured no shortage of trauma. In the 2016 film “Patriots Day,” she portrayed an injured survivor of the Boston Marathon bombing.

So when Brosnahan sought the role of Midge Maisel, a homemaker who finds catharsis in comedy after her husband walks out on her, she knew the against-type swerve rode on the audition. In a tale now entrenched in “Maisel” lore, Brosnahan read for the role while horribly ill. Yet her comfort holding court onstage came through.

“We had all these wonderful actresses come in and read for us, and when they would get to the stand-up scene, it was almost like — well, this is appropriate because of the movie — the mic was made of kryptonite,” Sherman-Palladino says. “She was the only one to lean into the microphone, and that is key, because comics lean in. There was something so smart about it, and so instinctual.”

Sherman-Palladino was already friendly with Gunn (his brother Sean was a regular on her series “Gilmore Girls”) when he asked for her Brosnahan scouting report. To Sherman-Palladino, the fearlessness Brosnahan exuded over five seasons playing a woman on the male-dominated stand-up circuit would serve her well in the world of capes and biceps. Seeing the confidence with which Brosnahan handled “Maisel’s” rat-a-tat dialogue, Gunn figured she’d step seamlessly into a throwback film that fuses Silver Age buoyancy with contemporary concerns.

“I knew right away that this movie definitely has an old Preston Sturges dialogue, David Mamet, ‘His Girl Friday’ sort of feel to it, and I needed somebody who could do that pitter-patter,” Gunn writes. “I loved Rachel from ‘Maisel,’ and when she came in she just killed that part of it.”

“Superman,” however, also comes with supervisibility: press tours, profiles, so many TikToks. Brosnahan grew uneasy when “Maisel” took off and she found herself struggling to dig into her inner life for journalists’ benefit as a 20-something at the outset of her career. (“I need a lot more therapy for that,” she remembers thinking.) Even now, she remains wary of cultivating a public persona so pronounced that it blurs the line between actor and character.

“So many people I love kind of drink their own Kool-Aid, and I think their work becomes less interesting,” Brosnahan says. “It feels so powerful to be able to transform and to watch other people transform. Sitting down and talking for an hour-and-a-half kind of removes the mystery.”

Still, that doesn’t stop Brosnahan from casually lingering for a good half-hour after I mention she’s free to take off. Talk of theater, social media and her two dogs gets her going. Brosnahan also repeatedly mentions a documentary she has been making for a year and a half but is not ready to discuss in detail. After launching the production company Scrap Paper Pictures in 2019 (and starring in its first film, the 2020 neo-noir thriller “I’m Your Woman”), she seems increasingly consumed by producing. And her passion for supporting deaf culture, after working on a couple of unproduced projects connected to that community, proves palpable.

Between those endeavors and the upcoming shoot for Season 2 of “Presumed Innocent,” the Apple TV+ anthology she’s toplining, it’s clear Brosnahan stays busy. But in the wake of the pandemic and the Hollywood strikes — during which she picketed, but also squeezed in a years-overdue honeymoon with her husband, actor Jason Ralph — she feels as if she’s had enough time off.

It’s the kind of grind that gets a journalist to the Daily Planet. Speaking of Lois, Brosnahan brings up one more throughline: They’re both precise — and they’re impulsive.

“Lois is someone who prides herself on being 10 steps ahead of everyone else,” Brosnahan says. “When something like the deep love that she has for Superman comes in and knocks her off her feet, she can’t figure out how to logic her way around it.”

Brosnahan, meanwhile, entered a world of heat vision and kaiju and superpowered pups ready to play Lois like she was shooting a ripped-from-the-headlines docudrama — only to allow herself to get swept up in all the comic panel spectacle.

“I understand the instinct to try to look around every corner,” says Brosnahan, who asks questions to know what she’s up against. “For me, that’s always been more about feeling a need to be perfect — to be overprepared, so you don’t make mistakes. It’s one of the things that I love about acting: It forces you to upend that every day.”