Try as she might to keep her head down and do her job (which is, by the way, being a kick-ass actress), Christina Hendricks is constantly dogged by fashion critics, tabloid reporters and magazine interviewers who only want to talk about her body.

In a recent clip picked up by the Sydney Morning Herald, the “Mad Men” star is asked yet again about her famous curves… in one of the most awkward, tactless ways we’ve ever seen.

The female interviewer for the Sun-Herald, who happens to be pretty petite herself, asks Christina with a smile, “You have been an inspiration as a full-figured woman. What is the most inspiring story that you can remember where you’ve inspired someone?” As if for emphasis (or in our case, extra cringing), she motions both hands in an hourglass shape on the words “full-figured.”

Christina remains poised yet chuckles awkwardly, shaking her head. “Uh, I don’t know. I don’t know…” she manages then motions to restart the portion of the interview.

Instead of taking the hint, the interviewer asks the question again, repeating the phrase “full-figure.” “I mean, you just said it again!” Christina says, throwing up her hands. The dense interviewer still doesn’t get it and must be waved off by a PR (who we imagine jumping up and down on the sidelines, mouthing “Shut it down! Shut it down!”).

We’re pretty sure the interviewer didn’t mean to ask, “When have you inspired someone by being fat?” but man, did it come off that way. Hendricks has had to deal with enough people — Cathy Horyn, Esquire, New York, the Daily Mail — commenting on her body shape to last a lifetime… she certainly didn’t need one more.

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Christina Hendricks is on the cover of the November 2012 TV special issue of Glamour UK magazine.

The 37-year-old actress looked stunning in an orange floral dress for the Walter Chin shot front page while dishing about everything from her love life to how “Mad Men” changed her career.

On “Mad Men:”
“It’s completely changed my career. Instead of people wondering who you are, you walk in and they say, “I love your show”. It’s a nice way to start an audition.”

On her husband Geoffrey Arend:
“It just became very obvious to me, I was smitten. He makes me laugh and he’s my best friend and I would always rather be with him than not, so those are pretty good indications.”

On her career outside of “Mad Men:”
“I hate to ever think of it finishing. I have concerns about finding something I’m going to fall in love with as much. I’ve got a couple of things lined up for the next break, and I hope to enjoy my home and husband.”

For more, be sure to pay a visit to Glamour UK!

The “Man Men” bombshell explains what Joan and Roger scene touched her most.

Mad Men actress Christina Hendricks didn’t have to time-travel too much for her role in Ginger & Rosa.

Like her AMC series, the Emmy nominee’s new movie — which is part of the Toronto, Telluride and New York film festival  lineups — is set in the 1960s — 1962, to be exact.

The movie stars Elle Fanning as a teen who overhears her father (Alessandra Nivola) start an affair with her best friend (Alice Englert).

Hendricks, who plays Fanning’s mom, said she sent in a videotape audition from Los Angeles to writer-director Sally Potter, who was in England, to land the part. She has nothing but praise for Potter.

“Sally encouraged me probably to be the most unself-conscious I have ever been at work,” Hendricks told The Hollywood Reporter in the THR TIFF Video Lounge at the Toronto film fest. “Really sort of just stripping down as literally a no makeup on my face and just sort feeling naked and vulnerable and embracing it and being OK with it, and that was special.”

Nivola, meanwhile, had his own unique experience on the film, calling the director “so meticulous.” He revealed Potter would spend “a lot of time” before filming started staring at Nivola.

“It got really uncomfortable,” he said, laughing. “We would just sit in a room; this was part of our rehearsal process, apparently.”

About a week before filming began, “she decided that my eyelashes were too long and that they obscured my eyes and something had to be done about it,” Nivola said.

So before every take, a designated crewmember had to curl Nivola’s eyelashes up so they wouldn’t get in the way of the scene.

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When it was announced that Ryan Gosling would be directing his first movie, a fantasy film that he wrote, and he had cast Christina Hendricks in the lead role, the project quickly became Vulture’s new favorite movie before even a frame of footage had been shot. “That’s a good place to start!” enthused Hendricks when we caught up with her today at the Toronto Film Festival. So how did the movie come about? Did Gosling ring her up and say simply, “Hey girl, I’ve got a script for you?”

“I don’t think he said ‘Hey girl,’ but the rest of it’s true,” laughed Hendricks, who says it was “crazy flattering” to get the offer. “His first big film, and he could have gotten anyone!” she said. “It was very heartwarming and the biggest compliment ever.”

According to Hendricks, Gosling first got in touch with his Drive costar a few months ago to say that he was writing a script with her in mind, and would she be interested in reading it? But that wasn’t all: “He sent the script over in this cool box with an interesting little key, and cool artwork in it,” recalls Hendricks. “It was like the full package! And then I read the script and was in love with it, so I called him back and said, ‘Yeah, please.’”

Entitled How to Catch a Monster, the film casts Hendricks as a single mother “supporting two children and trying to provide a home for them and a place of comfort in a continuously harder place to be,” explains the actress. “And I find myself working in this very surreal club that gets me into a sort of predicament, and in the meantime, these boys are off on their own adventures and they discover this underground city.”

Sounds ambitious. “I don’t know what the exact budget is, but I think we’ve got a nice amount,” said Hendricks. “I’m sure it will be incredibly clever, and Ryan already has storyboards and pictures of neighborhoods and homes, and he’s already collecting music for it … when you read it, it gives you the feeling, maybe, of a memory. Something from your childhood that you can’t really pinpoint.”

One last thing: Exactly what kind of club does her character work in? Are we talking “gentlemen’s club”? “Book club,” perhaps? Hendricks thought the question over, unsure whether she should say. “Fetish club,” she allowed. “Fetish club.” Yeah, that ought to tide us over for a while.

If an increasingly common sniff test for political candidates is to pick the one you’d want to have a beer with, then “Mad Men‘s” Christina Hendricks is well suited to meeting that standard as an Emmy contender.

Hendricks, sitting for an interview after breezing through a photo shoot, has a natural ease. It’s there in the way she salvages a questioner’s bumbling sally about her girlhood as daughter of a National Forest Service employee with her own spin. “I am still,” she says, with the smallest soupçon of irony, “friends with woodchucks.”

She’s enjoying, without much fuss, her third consecutive supporting actress in a drama nomination for playing Joan Holloway on AMC’s “Mad Men.” What plays for Joan as self-composure sitting atop a steely inner core gives way in conversation with Hendricks to casual, often mirthful grace and, underneath that, an unpretentious braininess.

“What’s been great for me,” says “Mad Men” creator Matt Weiner, “is for people to recognize the surprise that, all physical attributes aside, there is a tremendous depth to her portrayals, and you’re getting a real person there — somebody you want to meet, or sometimes don’t want to meet, but she’s a super-intelligent actress.”

Originally called in to read for the part of Midge, mistress to costar Jon Hamm’s Don Draper, Hendricks was upgraded to the then-compact role of Joan as office manager — what Weiner saw as “keeper of the office harem — but we changed her from guest star on the pilot to series regular immediately.”

(New fans of the cultural milestone that “Mad Men” has become, be warned that spoilers start here.) Read full article »

In Mad Men’s controversial fifth season episode “The Other Woman,” Christina Hendricks’ Joan Harris is offered an indecent proposal: sleep with the head of the Jaguar dealership association and receive a partnership in Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. Over the course of the episode, Hendricks’ Joan battles with the decision, ultimately choosing to sell her body for a seat at the table next to the men.

In Part 2 of a two-part deconstruction of “The Other Woman,” series creator Matthew Weiner and Emmy nominee Christina Hendricks dissect five sequences from the Emmy Award-nominated installment. What follows is an edited transcript from that conversation.

Pete Offers Joan an Indecent Proposal

Christina Hendricks: People’s reaction to that is, “Oh, Pete, he’s the worst, he’s the creepiest.” He’s not doing anything worse than what everyone else does in the episode, to be quite honest. He brings up the topic for the first time, but if he didn’t, who knows if someone else wouldn’t have stepped in and done it?

Matthew Weiner: He brings it up in a very clever way, which is like a tabloid version. He’s morally outraged by the suggestion and, by the way, what do you think of it?

Hendricks: Yes, yes, I find that to be utterly amusing. I could watch Vincent [Kartheiser] do that scene over and over again.

Weiner: What you’re seeing is a really great, persuasive, morally complex idea, and we love this slippery slope thing. He brings it up, and he has this smile when he stands up and when she says, “you couldn’t afford it,” because that means something different to a salesman than it means to you and me. To a salesman, it’s a crack in the door. His logic is: we’ve all made mistakes for nothing. Are we honestly supposed to think that Joan has never slept with a client? Don has slept with two that we know of. When the Japanese came in for the pitch, they put her front and center. She is the entry to the office and they show her off in all of her beauty and her power. That’s why I love when she says, “how does that come up?” None of this is new in a weird way.

Of course, the thing that he does that’s really morally reprehensible, that shows how the group dynamic works, is when he calls everybody into his office and brings it up. All of a sudden, it’s an institutionalized thing, where the company itself is going into its pocket to make this act happen, and now you’re in a different realm, and that’s what the story was about to me, too. How does something like that happen?

Hendricks: Matt and I had talked about [this idea] previously.

Weiner: Every time I talked to people from the era, it would always come up. Some woman would tell me something in a moment of confidence, at the very end of the conversation, and I was, like, wow, we’re going to have to do that sometime, and make sure that the stakes are high enough and rig it so it becomes a real choice. So Christina knew that there was a version of Joan doing this.

Hendricks: I didn’t know the consequences or the rewards; however you want to put it. Read full article »

AMC’s Mad Men has never shied away from uncomfortable or challenging circumstances, but Season 5’s “The Other Woman”—during which Emmy nominee Christina Hendricks’s Joan Harris had sex with a potential client in order to secure a partnership at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce—was instantly controversial, given Joan’s heartbreaking decision and because she is such a beloved character.

Nominated for writing (for co-writers Matthew Weiner and Semi Chellas) and directing (for Phil Abraham) Emmy awards, “The Other Woman” was also the episode submitted by Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss, and Hendricks in their respective categories, and rightly so. It’s an installment that is vicious in its condemnation of the treatment of women as objects of beauty to be owned and possessed, a thematic thread that manifests itself in the circumstances surrounding Joan, Peggy (Moss), and Megan (Jessica Paré). From Joan’s decision to sell herself for a shot at power to the pitch that Don makes to Jaguar—where the tagline reads, “At last, something beautiful you can truly own”—the notion of commodity and ownership provides a strong undercurrent in an episode that is riveting and eye-opening.

The Daily Beast spoke to Weiner and Hendricks about “The Other Woman,” and dissected five of the most indelible sequences from the Emmy-nominated installment. What follows is an edited transcript, the first in a two-part interview.

What did you make of the reaction to “The Other Woman”? Did you anticipate it being as polarizing an episode as it was?

Christina Hendricks: Yes, I did think it was going to be. It is a very controversial scenario.

Matthew Weiner: I was surprised. I knew it was a dramatic moment, and I expected it to be treated as drama, because the stakes were so high, and we knew Joan so well. But I also felt on some level, if we hadn’t used the word prostitution in there, it was more about the public nature of what was going on, and also their love for Joan, and the fact that she was put in this position that was so upsetting to people. I was stunned, though, by the suggestion that there were some people questioning about whether she would have actually done this or not. That shocked me. Maybe what they were saying is they were questioning whether they would have done it, but I was hoping, certainly judging on the history of the show and what Joan has done, obviously this is not the first time this has been an issue for her.

Given that, why do you think that people reacted so viscerally to Joan’s decision? Read full article »

Opening up about her style and some of her favorite pieces in her closet, Christina Hendricks sat down with host Laura Brown for Harper’s Bazaar’s YouTube show, “THE LOOK“, which was released Wednesday (July 18).

Before doing a little vintage shopping, the “Mad Men” star dished about what she thinks her AMC character Joan Harris would shop for, opining,

“I think Joan would go online looking for entertainment. Serving trays and glassware, maybe some sort of tooth pick for cheese”.

As for how her own personal style has evolved over the past five years, Miss Hendricks admitted,

“I think I have learned a lot from being on “Mad Men” actually as far as tailoring, silhouettes and things like that”.

At one point, the actress took the host shopping through her favorite store of My Ulrika in Los Angeles – where they had the interview – and grabbed a gold coat off a rack while saying

“every girl should have a beautiful metallic coat for the evening.”

There was a time when Mad Men‘s Joan Holloway, played by Christina Hendricks, was but the pneumatic head secretary at Sterling Cooper. Someone to be marveled at for her beauty and occasionally respected for her smarts, and yet ultimately dismissed in keeping with the sexism of the times.

Jump to now and she’s come a long way, baby.

In the wake of a season-ending salvo of episodes that firmly redefined Joan’s role at SCDP and in doing so gave Hendricks winning material, TVLine invited the actress to reflect on her character’s “amazing” arc, consider Mad Men‘s one too-hot-to-handle hook-up and explain why the cast’s lack of Emmy love is perhaps not such a bad thing.

TVLINE | Whose heart broke more – yours, saying goodbye to Jared Harris, or Joan’s, saying goodbye to Lane?
Thankfully I will see Jared in my life, because he’s a wonderful friend. But I do have to say, I cried when I heard the news [about Lane being killed off] for the first time.

TVLINE | Joan and Lane had a bit of a connection.
And Jared is such a wonderful actor and a great person. It’s difficult to know you don’t get to work with someone you enjoy so very, very much. But he and [series creator] Matt [Weiner] certainly had a long discussion about it, and it was for the benefit of the storytelling for the show. It was quite an amazing episode.

TVLINE | You’ve already spoken about getting wind of Joan’s unorthodox track to partnership. But at what point did Matt give you an idea that Joan would have the arc that she would, career-wise? When did you know that she was destined for bigger things?
I could be wrong, but I don’t think it was until I got the script for that episode. We had discussed this scenario before, but at the time I don’t think he told me “…and then she will be made partner.” Read full article »