Why everyone's talking about Mad Men's Christina Hendricks

Well, I don’t watch a lot of television myself, and until the second series, I didn’t have a single clue what Mad Men was. Two episodes in, however, I was hooked. I liked the dry drollery and stiff, suggestive costumes, the pillbox hats and bullet bras, the aching garters, the cinched waists, the endless cigarettes. I liked the morning whiskies, lunchtime martinis and — obviously — the afternoon sex, and yet the total absence of VPLs, fag ash or hangovers.

Weirdly, I also liked the retro sexism, the playful goosings and surprise proddings, and the way Sterling barked, “What do women want? Who cares?” before tossing a shot down his neck. I loved the women themselves — the Greek chorus of secretaries with their starched dresses, shiny coifs, and pre-feminist vulnerability, and I particularly liked the glacial housewife Betty Draper, and the career girl Peggy Olson, but particularly the secretary-pool maven Joan Holloway, with her pendulum hips and drop-dead put-downs. How she prowled the office like a cop on the beat, firing off acerbic comments such as “Roger,” (to her boss and lover) “if you had your way, I’d be stranded in some paperweight with my legs stuck in the air.”

And everyone else must have liked it, too, because, just ahead of the third season, the ultimate Silf (secretary I’d like to f***) is suddenly the unexpected star of the series. Eclipsing even Don Draper (Jon Hamm), Sterling Cooper’s creative director and the show’s all-American anti-hero lead, the character everyone talks about now is Joan, and they all do it in the same way, raising their hands to their chests in the shape of melons, saying: “Oh, my God! Do you mean the curvy redhead with the big…?” And if they’re women, also saying, “I think I’m a lesbian,” which makes Christina Hendricks, the 34-year-old actress who plays Joan, squeal with laughter.

“That’s so funny,” she says, sitting in Cole’s, a 1940s-style diner in downtown LA, which she calls “a classic Mad Men hangout”. In the flesh, she is milky and round and a little bit pink at the edges, smaller than you’d think, though, her figurehead bosom is today strapped away in a black Gary Graham asymmetric dress. The most Joanish thing about her is a full face of make-up — it’s, er, 11.30am on a Monday — because altogether, she is pretty un-Joanish, daffy. “More of a Peggy, actually,” she says, referring to the show’s square, plain copywriter. “Ambitious, but not in a way that takes people down.”

She admits that “The series has been a slow build. At first people were like, ‘What? You’re an actress in what? Mad Money?’” Now, however, she is a global icon, a fashion phenomenon — the designers Tory Burch, Michael Kors and Peter Som all channelled Joan last season — not to mention an internet star. Sites such as “What Would Joan Holloway Do?” feature waspish aphorisms such as: “Everyone deserves a second chance — with someone else.” A Facebook page is called “I’d like to engage in wanton and unchaste activities with Joan Holloway.”

“People do come up to me and say, ‘I’ve got such a crush,’” she says. “Sometimes women. They like to see a woman standing up for herself, especially in this atmosphere in 1962. Joan’s sassy. She snaps back. And men love her because she’s in touch with her sexuality and femininity. The men in the office can play with her a little bit. They can tease her, and she’s not going to be in the bathroom crying later.” The show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, initially wanted someone more “pinched and nasty”, she says. “But I can’t do that. That’s not me.” Instead, she introduced a kind of syncopated sultriness to the role and became the stationery cupboard’s answer to Marilyn Monroe — although, as Paul Kinsey, a young, moon-faced copywriter puts it: “Marilyn’s more of a Joan, not the other way around.”

“Joan is brimming with sexual energy,” says Weiner, a small, balding obsessive who has a tendency to giggle. A former writer on The Sopranos, he dreamt up Mad Men in early 2000 and is now its official oracle, much in the same way as one imagines JK Rowling might be for Harry Potter. “Christina is not like Joan, but as soon as we put her into costume…”

“It was like that!” Hendricks snaps her fingers. “All of a sudden I had a different walk than I normally have… Matt turned to me and said, ‘That’s Joan.’ I was walking around, like, boom boom boom. The undergarments and things change all of our postures, and my hands start to go like this…” She waves them languorously.

All the female actors, including January Jones (Betty) and Elisabeth Moss (Peggy), wear full authentic costumes and are “encouraged not to work out, not to slim down, because Matthew was very adamant that the women looked real”, says Jones. “They didn’t go to the gym in that time period. They were soft and feminine. None of us are big girls. We’re all pretty petite, but we’re not toned and not overly worked out.”

Hendricks admits she works out a little, and watches her weight — “I’ll have this French dip,” she says, attacking a blue cheese and lamb sandwich with alarming need, “and then I’m good for a couple of days” — but since the show started she has had “so many positive comments from women. Things like ‘It’s refreshing, makes me feel good to see you on screen, I have your body type, it’s not meant to be hidden away.’”

Nevertheless, the Tennessee native — who is 5ft 8in and, if the internet is to be believed, and, well, the internet does know a lot about such things, a 36C — has experienced her share of negative comments. Starting out as a model in her late teens, she was first told to return to her natural blonde hair colour — inspired by Anne of Green Gables, she has been a redhead since the age of 10 — then constantly told to lose weight.

“I was 115lb,” she says, but casting agents still asked her to lose some weight. “Off my ankles! On a couple of occasions, the client said, ‘We think she’s an amazing actress, but she’s a little too heavy for the role.’ People are so critical and mean. My husband [the actor Geoffrey Arend] and I were talking about it the other day — there’s an entire business on telling you how shitty you look at the Emmys, or the Golden Globes. Magazines dedicated to tearing you apart. Horrible!” She shrugs. “But at the same time it’s like, well, I live in Hollywood, what do I expect?”

And then God created Joan. With her ample bust, “Normally it was like, ‘Oh no, we have to fix it, hide it, you look too busty, is there another way you can wear that top?�� But on Mad Men, it was like, ‘You look great in that dress.’” The female characters wear vintage underwear with boning throughout the bodice, “So if you’re working a really long day, they dig in,” she grimaces. “The garters sometimes rub little blisters on your thigh. So we learn the tricks, put moleskin on them…” She sometimes wears dresses so tight that “I can’t step up into my trailer,” she sighs. “They have to put a box underneath and I get up sideways.”

Hendricks often finds herself lost in other details of the period. Weiner is a notorious perfectionist, regularly holding “tone meetings” for historical accuracy and continuity, as well as monitoring every hair clip, wrist flick, background banana…“Even apostrophes,” gasps Jared Harris, the son of the late actor Richard Harris, who joins the show for the third series as the British executive Lane Pryce, a thinly disguised David Ogilvy (the former British spy who revolutionised advertising on both sides of the Atlantic with campaigns such as “The Man in the Hathaway Shirt” and “Only Dove is one-quarter moisturizing cream”). “I said ‘he’s’ instead of ‘he is’,” says Harris. “Not only can you not change a word of the script, but you have to follow the punctuation.”

Hendricks nods. “Matt and I talk to our costume designer about every detail of Joan’s outfit. It’s important to be realistic, so we have closets of clothes and wear the same dress twice, like real people.” Then there’s the jewellery. “If it’s near a holiday in the show, Joan has a brooch or earrings that match. Every Thanksgiving I have acorns or something ridiculous that’s fabulous and horrible at the same time. And at Christmas time once we were talking about the earrings, were they holiday enough? This is what makes the show special.”

What also makes the show special, of course, is the “slightly smutty world beneath”, says Weiner, a world beyond the American dream, a world the ad men of Mad Men inhabit but don’t want to sell. This is a far more intriguing world, a slow-burn, low-watt, Hopperesque hinterland of hotel sex, sex with the secretary, last-minute sofa sex, hindering bra straps, slutty twins, full-fat milk, creamed corn, frustrated wives, torn silk stockings and lipstick-tarred cigarette butts. “I didn’t want Mad Men just to be about glamour, but ugliness, too,” says Weiner. “Sweat stains, clutter, cigarettes… It’s a little pornographic.”

Joan, whose prissy public persona veils her creamy sex life, is very much a creature of this world. “Mad Men is exceptionally sexy,” says Hendricks, “but never obviously so. There’s something really hot about a thigh or a garter, a bead of sweat. A breath; a look. Watching Betty on a dryer. It’s like, ‘Oooh, shit, that’s so hot!’ Also,” she says, “the scene with Peggy and Peter where he pulls her hair back and she looks at him. That was realistic behaviour. Matt was also telling me about a scene where Harry has a fling with his secretary. There’s a moment where they’re about to kiss, and they ended up using a very first take, not because the performances were the best, but because it was the first time these people in real life had ever kissed, and they got embarrassed and her temple started pounding. It was so hot. It was real.”

What has been the sexiest moment for her? I wonder about a scene that she performs in the new series, a blushing rendition of C’est Magnifique, singing and playing the accordion for dinner guests. She pauses. “The scenes in the hotel room with Roger were the only truly flirty scenes,” she says. “John Slattery [the actor who plays Roger] and I are praying for our affair to start again. He’s the only one for Joan. She would destroy anyone else.” What about her and Don? She shakes her head. “The world would explode. People want it so badly, but there’s been no set up for that, no indication that they would ever be attracted to one another.”

Unlikely anyway, given that at the start of the third series, Joan has married her handsome beefcake doctor and is leaving the office. Draper, too, is trying to make yet another go of his marriage — although in Draperworld this appears to involve pulling the nearest air hostess (the opening scene), having a weird threesome with two teenagers, and flirting rabidly with his children’s teacher. He’s still an advertising genius, of course — “Matt told me one thing,” says Harris, “one cast-iron rule of series television: the main male lead can do anything. Anything, as long as he’s good at his job” — and has at least moved back in with his vacantly simmering (and now pregnant, smoking and drinking) wife, Betty.

But he is facing wider upheaval, too. The agency has been taken over by the British — a nod to Ogilvy — and now that we’re in spring 1963 (Mad Men is specific like that) there’s the looming spectre of the assassination of President Kennedy, the tom-toms of civil rights and feminism. Peggy Olson is asking for equal pay, Pete Campbell suggesting the agency target the black market.

Still, the show has hardly gone soft — it’s a racist, homophobic and sexist (phew!) smorgasbord. In fact, it contains probably the most shocking scene in the series to date, in which “Roger Sterling sings in black face at a garden party,” says Jared Harris. “Outrageous! It wasn’t a simpler, kinder, gentler time at all. It was extremely complicated and messy and people were even more f***ed up than now. But that’s what appeals to people.”

Hendricks finds it difficult to deal with this aspect of the show at times. “Every script has shocked me,” she says. “Now we all just laugh. I guess we’re a very dark group, but some people are horrified, and you’re like, yeah. Of course. In one episode, Joan went up to Paul Kinsey saying ‘You’re only dating a black girl because of this this and this’, and I thought ‘Oh shit, all of a sudden Joan’s coming across as this monster, a racist!’ So Matt and I had a long conversation about it. Joan is not a racist, Paul Kinsey was being ridiculous and Joan is saying it how it is. Even though she was bossy and aggressive and can be bitchy, people had a good response to her because she was confident and in control, and was trying to be helpful and was playful. But it really worried me. Joan can be really horrible.”

There are other changes, too. Previously, the focus has been very much on the men, says Weiner. But now that five out of the new series’s 13 episodes are directed by women, and the show’s writers are mostly women — unheard of in an industry where more than 70% of writers are men — and that the sexual revolution is just about to rip everyone’s knickers off (but in a different way), I can’t help feeling that Mad Men is now actually more about the women. Certainly, I’m slightly fed up with the douchey, one-dimensional ways of the lead males; if Don Draper tugs on a fag and pulls that doughy face once more I’ll scream. No: this series, I’m much more interested in Peggy, Joan and Betty, their hopes and fears, what they, as women, are about to achieve. Back in 1960, says Weiner, “you could call anyone a girl. Eleanor Roosevelt — ‘a nice girl’.” Peggy, Joan, and Betty are becoming women. “They represent the female problem on several levels,” says Weiner.

So we have Mrs Draper in some kind of uneasy parody of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, a confused and unfulfilled stay-at-home tempted by another man. Peggy’s in an uneasy parody of Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl, with a pioneering job, but her ongoing attempts to bag a husband — a one-night stand with Pete Campbell resulting in a love child; a clumsy attempt at seducing Don, her boss — are “horribly self-destructive”, says Weiner. “How stupid and clever can you get?”

And then there’s Joan, the everywoman, a girl who has spent her twenties living it up and working in New York, but now, in her early thirties, has to swallow the leaden pill of marriage. Joan, says Hendricks, is “dealing with being a wife. She’s going from a career woman to a wife, but she’s still definitely running the show. She’s doing it graciously and warmly, taking care of her husband, but still wearing the pants.”

Still, I am sure that Joan, like most women, will eventually wig out, because, although Weiner insists that “the predominantly female writing staff makes no difference”, there is definitely something emotional and feminine and intense about Mad Men, something that makes viewers come to him and tell him “usually very intimate things”, he giggles. “Couples will watch the show and then have sex, or a fight, which results from the women being attracted to Don Draper and his behaviour and the men being infuriated that they can’t behave like him.” Hmm, some do, I say. Weiner sighs. “The message is not to be like Don Draper,” he emphasises. “Seducing people in the workplace is bad. But in the bedroom there is a charge to a man who knows what he wants.”

Oh, it’s all so complicated! Deliciously complicated. I guess there’s only one simple thing about Mad Men, and I couldn’t put it better than Weiner himself: “Of course a lot of this behaviour is possible if you look like Jon Hamm.” And if you look like January Jones, I say, or Christina Hendricks. And if you have Hendricks’s chest. Just how does she feel about having the best boobs in the world? She lowers her voice. Twists. Pouts. For a moment, she is Joan. “They are fabulous,” she purrs.