Actress relishes role as ‘Mad Men’s’ outspoken woman
For Christina Hendricks, playing Joan Holloway on “Mad Men” has been an eye-opening experience.
Not only is Joan one of the most intriguing and contradictory people on the drama, but Hendricks has had to deal with a variety of feedback about her character, who is the office manager at the show’s fictional Sterling Cooper ad agency.
Even Hendricks herself had surprising reactions to Joan during the show’s acclaimed first season.
“I remember when I first got the script where (Joan’s) roommate came to the office and she’s just been fired. And Joan says, ‘Sit down, tell me everything that happened,’” Hendricks said in a recent phone interview. “And I remember going, ‘Wait a minute, I don’t know how to play this scene — Joan is being really nice.’”
Joan certainly can be brusque with junior secretaries. But last season, she was tender and sweet with Roger Sterling (John Slattery), her married lover. And although she doesn’t understand the creative goals of Peggy (Elisabeth Moss), a secretary who has been promoted to copywriter, Joan also is an ambitious professional.
“I don’t think a woman (at that time) would be office manager and running the whole place … if she wasn’t driven,” Hendricks said. “And Joan could go out and find a husband quite easily. She’s an attractive, smart, successful woman, but she’s not pursuing that. She’s doing things that are safe to a certain degree, because she can’t marry a man who’s already married.”
What’s most satisfying is “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner never has made her seem like a TV stereotype.
She’s not a predictable man-eater, a one-note scold or a character who is prone to soapy promiscuity. Joan is a complicated, guarded survivor in an era that wasn’t kind to women with professional ambitions.
At a recent panel discussion of the show, Hendricks recalled one woman in the audience talking about the show’s early ’60s accuracy.
“As she talked about it, you could tell that the memories were coming up in her and that her body was tensing up,” Hendricks said. “You could tell that watching the show, for her, was certainly bringing up a lot.”
“I never hear anyone say, this is so farfetched. I hear the women say, ‘This is how it was,’ ” she adds.
Fans often ask what it’s like to work on a show in which the male characters can be so sexist: Hendricks says she tells them that her first read-through of the show’s scripts sometimes make her “catch (her) breath.”
“It’s the initial reading that really takes you by surprise, then you just settle in” and play the part, she says.
Although Joan’s behavior sometimes shocks the woman who’s playing her, Hendricks says she also gets a lot of positive feedback.
“I have women coming up to me and saying, ‘I love your character! She’s so empowered. She takes control; she gets what she wants,’” the actress notes. “That’s another side of her. And I respect that in Joan. She says and does things that I would never allow myself to do. Sometimes I think they’re nuts, and sometimes I admire (the actions she takes).”
One of Hendricks’ favorite scenes takes place early in Season 1.
The women on the staff of Sterling Cooper are assembled in a conference room to test lipstick shades for a client. Through a one-way mirror, a group of ad executives watch the women, making sexist comments all the while. At one point, Joan joins the women in the conference room and makes a point of bending over and showing off her alluring figure to the men.
“She was playing. She knew what they were doing on the other side of that mirror,” Hendricks said. “She was taking the control back, instead of being the victim. … She wasn’t being slutty, she was being confident and sexual. That was one of my favorite scenes. It was one of the best, revealing moments for Joan, and I also just love the dynamic of men and women on either side of that glass (that) I think it sums up a lot about ‘Mad Men’ — in particular, (what goes on) in the office.”