In a new interview, the Good Girls actor remembered facing sexist questions and working with showrunner Matthew Weiner. For seven seasons Christina Hendricks starred on Mad Men as Joan Holloway—a charismatic secretary turned ad executive who suffered no fools. And much like her character, Hendricks faced more than her share of sexist nonsense throughout the show’s run.
In a recent interview with The Guardian, the actor vented some frustration about the press she received during her time on the show—namely, about Joan’s undergarments. “There certainly was a time when we were very critically acclaimed, and getting a lot of attention for our very good work and our very hard work, and everyone just wanted to ask me about my bra again,” Hendricks said. “There are only two sentences to say about a bra.”
Hendricks, who earned six Emmy nominations for her role, also said that the female stars of Mad Men weren’t as celebrated as their male counterparts during the early seasons of the drama. “Men started dressing like Don Draper and Roger Sterling. Suits came back in, skinny ties came back in,” Hendricks remembered. “It took three to four seasons, and then all of a sudden people wanted us [the female stars] on magazines. We were like: This is strange—we’ve been doing this for a while.”
In her interview Hendricks also addressed Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, who was accused of sexual misconduct by Kater Gordon, an Emmy-winning former writer for the show. In 2017, Gordon said that Weiner told her “that I owed it to him to let him see me naked” while working together in 2008. Marti Noxon, a consulting producer on Mad Men, supported Gordon’s accusation in a series of tweets, claiming that Weiner created “the kind of atmosphere where a comment like ‘you owe it to me to show me your naked body’ may -- or may not -- be a joke. And it may -- or may not -- lead to a demotion or even the end of a career.” (In a 2018 Vanity Fair interview, Weiner said that he didn’t remember making the remark: “I never felt that way and I never acted that way towards Kater.”)
Hendricks, who worked with Weiner again on 2018’s Amazon series The Romanoffs, did not echo the allegations against the showrunner. “My relationship with Matt was in no way toxic,” she told The Guardian. “I don’t discount anyone’s experience if I wasn’t there to see it, but that wasn’t my experience. Was he a perfectionist, was he tough, did he expect a lot? Yes. And he would say that in a second. We were hard on each other.”
