Christina Hendricks is celebrating the forthcoming beginning of the fifth season of “Mad Men” by posing in a new photo shoot for V Magazine.
Here’s part of the interview:
“Oh, I can totally go unnoticed. I ran around all day today. Not a mention,” insists Christina Hendricks, star of AMC’s 1960s period series Mad Men. “In Los Angeles you know the neighborhoods where you’re more likely to get noticed. And then you probably put on lipstick.”
It’s difficult to accept that after four seasons of embodying Joan Harris (née Holloway)—the efficient, famously voluptuous office manager who thanklessly presides over Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce wearing a parade of wiggle dresses—Hendricks could still enjoy anonymity. Fans will surely be looking for her when Mad Men returns on March 25th, eager to discover more about her character’s unexpected pregnancy. “It probably surprised a lot of people. It certainly surprised me,” she says. “Joan certainly has motherly instincts—at least in a bossy way.” Hendricks is more savvy now than she was when Mad Men introduced its distinctive brand of cerebral, obsessively art-directed drama. For example, she no longer turns black-and-blue from wearing her character’s restrictive girdles and garters. “Now I put moleskin underneath the rubber so it doesn’t rub against my skin,” she says. “I still get a little bruised up, but I’m learning the tricks of the trade.”
Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, Hendricks landed her first consequential role in 1999 on MTV’s teen soap Undressed—a Skins precursor that served as a Mickey Mouse Club for maturing young actors (“Most people in Los Angeles have that on their résumé,” the multiple Emmy-nominee explains with a laugh). She played a college student named Rhiannon who crashes at her aunt’s house with a rapper she meets at a bus station (YouTube can fill in the rest). “I used to play characters more naïve than Joan, who is so sophisticated and…not jaded, but worldlier,” she says. “I’ve definitely learned from playing a character that is so confident and resilient.”
Which is not to say that during her rise to fame the radiant natural blonde did not receive her share of industry-issued validation. She can share a proper fashion anecdote dating to her time modeling in the mid ’90s, like walking in a Hussein Chalayan show or inspiring a young Karen Elson to dye her hair a career-boosting red. But because of her work on Mad Men, Hendricks now commands red carpets—and has even orchestrated some bonafide Hollywood bombshell moments, like at the 2011 Golden Globe Awards when she lost an $850,000 bracelet on loan from Chopard, and after an event worker found the ornament and returned it to her, pleaded with security to allow her to leave the auditorium and deliver it to her publicist for safekeeping, whereupon the guard watched as Hendricks pulled the 124 carats of platinum-set diamonds out of her acclaimed cleavage and passed them to her rep through a crack in the door. Bull’s-eye. “I couldn’t put it in my purse,”
Gallery Link
[006] Photoshoot & Portrait Sessions > Session #69
