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Kiernan Shipka says being a child actor on ‘Mad Men’ was ‘intense’
Kiernan Shipka didn’t realize as a child star how “intense” her acting was on “Mad Men.”
“I’m surprised because I wasn’t really thinking it was heavy duty at the time,” she told Page Six at the premiere of “White House Plumbers” earlier this week.
The actress, 23, explained that she was too young to really know what she was doing.
“I didn’t know anything else,” she shared. “That’s what I did. But looking back, I go, ‘Yeah, well, that was really intense.”
Shipka played the role of Sally Draper for the show’s entire run from 2007 to 2015, starting from when she was just 7 years old. In the critically acclaimed drama, her character went through her parents’ bitter divorce and her mother’s death.
The “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” alum also appreciates now how fortunate she was to land that role.
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“I got really lucky as a kid,” she said. “Just to be trusted with the performance and not really doubted. And I think in turn, I just didn’t really doubt myself and I found my abilities in ways that I might not have if they were stifled or people tried to shape or shift them in some kind of way.”
“They let me be on that set,” she added, “and I’m so thankful for that.”
Shipka currently stars in the upcoming drama, “White House Plumbers,” which follows the inept bungling by Watergate burglars E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy as they inadvertently toppled the Nixon presidency.
In it, she plays Hunt’s daughter Kevan.
Shipka shares that she knew the “bare bones” about the infamous political scandal that led to Nixon resigning but “I learned so much, delving in there. And learning about the execution and the characters behind the scandal was very surprising.”
“All of it was so shocking,” she shared. “I was so surprised reading every script and the more I learned about it, the more I went, ‘Wait…'”
“It’s a dramatization, obviously,” she continued “but it’s also quite true to the story.”
Shipka attended the premiere along with her on-screen parents, Woody Harrelson and Lena Headey, along with Domhnall Gleeson, Yul Vazquez, Judy Greer, and her “Mad Men” co-star, Rich Sommer.
