The Cringeworthy Thing Rachel Brosnahan Pulled Out Of Her NYC Toilet

In the weeks since the COVID-19 variant omicron first landed in the U.S., public figures like President Joe Biden and top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci are once again urging people to follow health mandates and proceed with caution. And a number of celebrities outside the political sphere are also doing their part — some in more unorthodox ways than others. Enter "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" star Rachel Brosnahan.

On December 21, Brosnahan shared a rather gross Instagram post doing toilet repair — interestingly, starting off the caption with a message to residents of a city facing yet another drastic uptick in COVID-19 cases due to the omicron variant. "New York, I love you," she wrote. "Stay safe out there folks and let's please look out for each other as this new wave moves through our ranks."

Rather than a traditional sign-off, however, Brosnahan went with a different tack — one which clarified why the photo depicted the "Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" star kneeling next two a toilet, with a plunger in one hand, and what appeared to be a broken broom stick in the other. Not only did the rest of the caption reveal why Brosnahan was stick-deep in a toilet bowl, but that a horrifying find was hidden somewhere among the pipes. 

In the final line of her Instagram post (pictured above), Rachel Brosnahan revealed exactly what she was fishing out of her apartment latrine. "In other NYC news, today I pulled a drowned rat out of our toilet," Brosnahan wrote, in a horrifying coda and accompanying conclusion.

As any New York City resident knows, the sewer rat is one the city's denizens have grown accustomed to. They're even meme-able, as seen in the virality of "Pizza Rat," a 2015 video which featured an NYC rat pulling an entire piece of pizza down into the depths of the Five Boroughs' underground subway system.

Still, perhaps the reason why Brosnahan found the rat in the toilet in the first place is because the population of rats in one of the most densely populated cities in the U.S. has drastically increased since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Per The New York Times, 21,000 phone calls were made in response to rat sightings from November 2020 through November 2021 — a significant increase from the year begore. The Times reported this uptick was due to closed and abandoned restaurants, which are rife grounds for rat breeding, along with an uptick in household garbage produced and discarded in non-commercial ways.