‘Mad Men’ Star Christina Hendricks Reveals Her Curvy Figure Cost Her Acting Roles
Christina Hendricks made heads turn as strong-willed and curvaceous Joan Holloway on “Mad Men”, but the actress admits that her voluptuous figure isn’t quite the Hollywood ideal, and led her to lose out on many acting roles over the years.
In a new interview with The Times, Hendricks opens up about how her shape led to struggles to be cast prior to landing the “Mad Men” role that put her on the map.
“I auditioned for things where I knew I killed the audition. I knew I did,” Hendricks, 42, tells The Times.
“It was like, ‘Oh, should I give you my sizes now, or…’ And they would call up and say, ‘We just don’t think that a doctor would look like that,'” she adds. “I would be embarrassed to even say that out loud.”
In fact, she admits that when she auditioned for “Mad Men” during pilot season, she walked in feeling “a little bit defeated. But I just put on my game face and did it. And I got this role. And ever since then I get all these, like, amazing, strong-assed powerful women,” she says.
She credits the vision of “Mad Men” creator Matt Weiner for casting her as Joan, for which she delivered a performance so powerful it’s difficult to even imagine another actress in the role.
“It took Matt’s beautiful writing to put me in the right place,” says Hendricks. “I think one of the reasons people always want to be that character is because she is so powerful and strong, but super-feminine. People couldn’t imagine you could do that and still be feminine.”
As Hendricks explains, the body types we see on movies and TV simply don’t reflect the real world.
“There should be a million different body types [on television],” she tells The Times. “It’s outrageous that there aren’t. And it’s outrageous that we’re sitting here having this conversation and it’s even a thing.”
To make her point, she jokes that if aliens came to Earth and could only understand the human race through the movies and TV series left behind, “they would think we were all starving to death… if we all died from global warming and all the aliens found were movies,” she says. “So they think, ‘This is what human beings looked like.’ They’ll think we all starved to death.”
