The sexy star of Mad Men — and Esquire’s all-new issue devoted to women — has a few things she’d like to get off her chest. Also, watermelon.

We love your body. If we’re in love with you, we love your body. Your potbelly, everything. Even if you’re insecure about something, we love your body. You feel like you’re not this or that? We love your body. We embrace everything. Because it’s you.

Speaking of your body, you don’t understand the power of your own smell. Any woman who is currently with a man is with him partly because she loves the way he smells. And if we haven’t smelled you for a day or two and then we suddenly are within inches of you, we swoon. We get light-headed. It’s intoxicating. It’s heady.

We remember forever what you say about the bodies of other women. When you mention in passing that a certain woman is attractive — could be someone in the office, a woman on the street, a celebrity, any woman in the world, really — your comment goes into a steel box and it stays there forever. We will file the comment under “Women He Finds Attractive.” It’s not about whether or not we approve of the comment. It’s about learning what you think is sexy and how we might be able to convey it. It’s about keeping our man by knowing what he likes.

We also remember everything you say about our bodies, be it good or bad. Doesn’t matter if it’s a compliment. Could be just a comment. Those things you say are stored away in the steel box, and we remember these things verbatim. We remember what you were wearing and the street corner you were standing on when you said it.

Never complain about our friends — even if we do. No matter how many times we say a friend of ours is driving us crazy, you are not to pile on. Not because it offends us. But because it adds to the weight that we carry around about her.

Remember what we like. When I first started dating my husband, I had this weird fascination with the circus and clowns and old carnival things and sideshow freaks and all that. About a month after we started dating, he bought me this amazing black-and-white photo book on the circus in the 1930s, and I started sobbing. Which freaked him out. I thought, Oh, my God, I mentioned this three or four weeks ago and talked about it briefly, but he was really listening to me. And he actually went out and researched and found this thing for me. It was amazing.

We want you to order Scotch. It’s the most impressive drink order. It’s classic. It’s sexy. Such a rich color. The glass, the smell. It’s not watered down with fruit juice. It’s Scotch. And you ordered it.

Stand up, open a door, offer a jacket. We talk about it with our friends after you do it. We say, “Can you believe he stood up when I approached the table?” It makes us feel important. And it makes you important because we talk about it.

No shorts that go below the knee. The ones almost like capri pants, the ones that hover somewhere between the kneecap and the calf? Enough with those shorts. They are the most embarrassing pants in the world. They should never be worn. No woman likes those.

Also, no tank tops. In public at least. A tank top is underwear. You’re walking around in your underwear. Too much.

No man should be on Facebook. It’s an invasion of everyone’s privacy. I really cannot stand it.

You don’t know this, but when we come back from a date, we feel awkward about that transition from our cute outfit into sexy lingerie. We don’t know how to do this gracefully. It’s embarrassing. We have to find a way to slip into another room, put on the outfit as if it all happened very easily, and then come out and it’s: Look at me! Look at the sexy thing I’ve done! For you, it’s the blink of an eye. It’s all very embarrassing. Just so you know.

Panties is a wonderful word. When did you stop saying “panties”? It’s sexy. It’s girlie. It’s naughty. Say it more.

About ogling: The men who look, they really look. It doesn’t insult us. It doesn’t faze us, really. It’s just — well, it’s a little infantile. Which is ironic, isn’t it? The men who constantly stare at our breasts are never the men we’re attracted to.

There are better words than beautiful. Radiant, for instance. It’s an underused word. It’s a very special word. “You are radiant.” Also, enchanting, smoldering, intoxicating, charming, fetching.

Marriage changes very little. The only things that will get a married man laid that won’t get a single man laid are adultery and whores. Intelligence and humor (and your smell) are what get you laid. That’s what got you laid when you were single. That’s what gets you laid when you’re married. Everything still works in marriage: especially intelligence and humor. Because the sexiest thing is to know you.

© Esquire

Woman of the Hourglass
Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks finds talk of her body boring. A minority opinion, to be sure. Particularly this season.

Christina Hendricks thinks all the talk about her body is a little embarrassing. It’s not as if she has an extra limb, after all. She just has an especially attractive version of the same thing women have had forever—curves—but she happens to have them in a profession where women haven’t for quite some time.

“It kind of hurt my feelings at first,” she says. “Anytime someone talks about your figure constantly, you get nervous, you get really self-conscious. I was working my butt off on the show, and then all anyone was talking about was my body!”

You can see why all the focus on how big the chest, how narrow the waist, how round the hips could drive an actor—anyone—insane, but people were only noticing Christina Hendricks’s body because they were finally noticing Christina Hendricks. Her portrayal of Joan Holloway, the complicated office queen of Sterling Cooper (Draper Pryce!), on Mad Men is properly captivating for its combination of total competence and heartbreaking vulnerability. And she delivers the spectacular performance while looking extremely different from the other women we’ve grown used to seeing on television, in movies, on the covers of magazines. “It might sound silly,” she says, “but I didn’t realize I was so different. I was just oblivious. Sometimes I would go on an audition and someone would say something like, Girl, you’re refreshing! That was it.”

And it’s not Hendricks’s fault that she’s come to everyone’s attention as an actress at a time when bodies are very much an issue—if not the issue—as far as fashion is concerned. There are the various attempts by fashion cities like São Paulo and Milan to police model weight; there are press conferences, BMI restrictions, mandatory turkey sandwiches backstage at every show. But lately there have also been baby steps taken toward the (unfortunately) radical idea that looking good need not involve so much rejection of the naturally occurring female shape. Glamour has begun to mix models of various sizes into its regular editorial shoots. A recent issue of V concerned itself with shape, pointing out that clothes—even fashion clothes—can look good on differently sized people.

But too often the size discussion becomes almost grotesque, as if the only alternative to being as lean as a skinless Perdue chicken breast is to veer wildly (and unhealthily) in the opposite direction (Gabourey Sidibe, Beth Ditto). One can’t help wonder if the fashion world’s obsession with those two women, both of whom deserve prominent coverage for their talent first and foremost, isn’t in some sense overcompensation, an attempt to atone for the terribly thin models who still hold sway everywhere. Either way, it becomes a game of extremes.

There is a spectacular other path. And Hendricks working the Emmy’s red carpet in formfitting L’Wren Scott is terrific PR for the opinion that Hollywood success should not be determined by one’s ability to Pilates one’s hips up, off, and away. None of this is meant to suggest that Hendricks is big. She is not. (That the New York Times seemed to endorse a stylist’s description of her as “a big girl” in its coverage of the Golden Globes was mystifying and strange.) It is also not to suggest that her figure is attainable to the average duck. She looks the way movie stars used to look. She is, in that sense, proof of how certain bodies go in and out of fashion.

It is perhaps ironic then that Hendricks actually started out as a model—catalogues, mostly, but there was one season on the London runway that ended when her agent said, “Darling, did your boobs grow?” (One imagines that future seasons might see the question posed in the opposite direction.) Now, she is a fully working actor, with three new films in the can and several more under consideration. Curiously, she keeps getting called in to audition for roles as the mothers of people she isn’t nearly old enough, at 34, to have birthed—which has a lot to do with what she wears on TV. “The way we dress on Mad Men is so associated with old photographs, with people’s parents and grandparents,” she says. “In person, I wear jeans and flip-flops and people are so shocked. They tell me I look so much younger than they expected.”

Work on a new season of Mad Men is about to begin. “We’re really spoiled on Mad Men,” she says. “Lots of television actors use the down season to go out and get creatively fulfilled, but I feel the opposite. Anything else I get to do is just icing.”

As for the body question, she’ll answer it when asked, but mostly it bores her. “It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth,” she says. “Back when I was modeling, if someone said ‘I’m fasting,’ I would say, ‘Can’t we talk about something else?’”

© NY Mag

She’s driving men mad with her curves has a girlish vulnerability and chip-free scarlet nail polish. Her hemline is never anything other than modest, but she has a pair of breasts which, even under a woollen jumper, look like two zeppelins storming towards the finish line, writes Jane Graham.

She is Mad Men’s Joan Holloway and, as many of the show’s fans will tell you, she is one of the most divine creations on God’s flatscreen.

Mad Men, the third series of which is currently running on BBC2, is an American drama about the lives and loves of workers in an advertising agency in the early 1960s. Intelligent, classy and sharp, Mad Men is many things but most of all it is a brilliant study of the contradictions of the time it is set in. This is a period in history when social and political waves were rushing at each other from opposite directions, on the cusp of the tsunami of Vietnam and sexual liberation. Social propriety is still key — divorce is frowned on, as are short skirts, drunk females, working mums and swearing.

No one, however, thinks anything of a respected company boss blacking up like Al Jonson to sing at a garden party for wealthy genteels, or speaks out against a rich husband and father booking his regular Wednesday afternoon trysts with his mistress.

The inhabitants of the Mad Men universe talk about heritage, legacy and American values, but fight ruthlessly to secure clients who want to knock down historical monuments and replace them with hotel and entertainment complexes.

In the middle of all of these contradictions, these incongruous urges, is the agency’s office manager Joan Holloway, played by Christina Hendricks. And Joan is the greatest, and most beguiling ambiguity of all.

A committed and dutiful worker, her Jessica Rabbit figure is the biggest cause of distraction in the building. She is flawlessly groomed from head to toe, and does a mean line in cupcakes and pastries, but she’s also got an edge like a razor, and some great one-liners up her sleeve. She giggles in a sisterly style with the girls, then walks through the office with a wiggle which would tear any red-blooded man from his new bride’s side in a breathless moment.

Her voice is as light and girlish as Disney’s Snow White but she speaks with the brisk, clear confidence of Susan Sarandon. If Mad Men is, as is often claimed, where style meets substance, Joan Holloway must be the moment of collision.

Joan is an absolute master stroke from Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men. At first glance she is a classic American siren, with the shiny red mane of Rita Heyworth, the killer curves of Marilyn Monroe, the self-possession of Ava Gardner and the enigmatic smile — half Bambi, half hooker — of Twin Peaks’ Sherilyn Fenn.

Her respectable pencil skirts, perfectly coiffured hair and hourglass silhouette make her a devastating combination of demure and verging on illegal, as if she’s tried her best to contain her body, but it just keeps on betraying her.

I often imagine her stepping into a local library, maybe the lobby of The Europa, or even better, the chamber of Stormont — what chaos this blinding visage of colour, light, beauty and sex would cause!

But Weiner was too ambitious to make his regular characters mere one-note signifiers. Joan is much more complex than that.

Increasingly torn between a job she enjoys and is good at — she is queen bee in the agency — and the lure of domestic married baby-bound bliss, she represents modern women more convincingly than any character in the programme. While she has accepted with dignity the injustices typical of her times, such as being overlooked for a promotion in preference for a far less capable man, and has now married a man who raped her, Joan is no walkover. “I don’t want to argue,” states her husband forcibly. “Stop talking then,” she replies crisply.

The mistakes Joan has made with men — and her none too perfect union with current husband Greg Harris — have given her anxieties as compelling as any of the men in the series, and those men are some of the best-drawn figures on American television.

The story goes that Weiner originally only aimed to bring Joan into the show briefly but due to Christina Hendricks’s ‘on-screen magnetism’, the decision was made to flesh her out properly, and keep her in for the long haul. Rarely can a televisual re-think have proved more salutary.

Like all the best female characters, Joan is as adored by women as she is by men — both in the fictional and in the real world. The reasons that men love her don’t need to be spelled out here. But women’s responses are just as strong, perhaps even stronger.

Despite Joan’s acceptance of some rules that many women today would find distasteful — she demurs to men when it comes to matters of business and technology and regards her allure as her best asset, regularly giving her girlfriends advice on how maximise theirs — she is also an immensely empowering creature for a woman to watch.

It’s fun seeing her turn imposing egotistical patriarchs into jelly and verbally, Joan can spar with any man, and takes pleasure in doing so. Her bad luck with men has made her endearingly vulnerable, and her soft warmth means we’re rooting for her.

She has a fleshy, healthy body that normal women can relate to, and it’s comforting to be so readily convinced that this — and not the bony waifs we constantly see in our magazines — is what really turns the opposite sex on. Saying that, even the fashion magazines love Joan; her beautifully cut clothes — always in the most vivid red, the richest green — have made her their darling.

As luck would have it, one of Joan’s most fabulous scenes is in a recent episode (episode 3.3) and you can still watch it on BBC IPlayer. Joan and her husband Greg are hosting a dinner party, during which Joan’s excellent manners, free and easy friendliness and two-tier cake tray have impressed all of the guests. So much so that Joan is beginning to suspect that her new husband is not as respected by his peers as she first imagined.

Greg begins to goad Joan into ‘playing something’. After politely brushing him off a few times she surrenders and Greg goes off to fetch her … accordion! There’s an element of pure parody to this revelation of yet another of Joan’s talents — is she, you wonder, going to finish the night by doing the splits while tap-dancing in rollerskates?

But something magical happens when she gets up to play the fluffy little Cole Porter song, C’est Magnifique. Maybe it’s her defiant but coquettish delivery of Cole Porter’s peppy French lyrics or the way her eyes flash with anger while she simultaneously takes on an air of puppyish playfulness, but the sensuality and poignancy Joan — or perhaps Hendricks’ — brings to the unexpected performance of an ode to marriage by a disappointed wife makes for TV gold dust. It’s an unforgettable scene, as funny and strange as it is mesmerising.

For anyone who marvelled at the formidable CJ throwing her jacket off and purring her way lasciviously though The Jackal in The West Wing all those years ago, trust me — this is as good. Where Joan is concerned, it’s all good.

The critics love it, but who else is watching?

It’s one of the most talked about TV shows of the age, with critics raving about its drama, glamour and questionable morals — yet relatively few people here actually tune in to watch Mad Men.

Largely, that’s due to its scheduling — 10pm on BBC Four.

Those who do make the effort to tune in, however, tend to become instant converts, immediately intent on spreading the message about this multi-award-winning US drama.

Its creator Matthew Weiner has admitted: “I didn’t want Mad Men just to be about glamour, but ugliness too.”

And it seems the heady mix of both means that Mad Men has proved equally seductive to men and women viewers.

With its provocative dialogue (“Have we ever hired any Jews?” “Not on my watch”) and super-sexy women in so-tight pencil skirts, this is, as one reviewer put it, “full-bodied lifestyle porn”.

Season three has just started, so what are you waiting for?

© Belfast Telegraph

“Move over Julia Child, Christina Hendricks is in the kitchen!” – Entertainment Weekly

“[An] intriguing introspective look at. . .relationships.” – Movie Room Reviews

**** stars – “Delicious” – About.com

You can check out the trailer on the official site or by clicking the cap below.

The most intimate room in the house is the kitchen,” insists screenwriter A.W. Gryphon. “It’s where we care for people by feeding them, have the best conversations and, of course, where we stage the greatest seductions.” That’s why Gryphon chose it as the setting for the simple and tenderly beautiful exploration of love served up in the multiple award-winning movie La Cucina.

La Cucina features an exceptional cast: Christina Hendricks (Mad Men breakout sensation) makes her film debut opposite international star Joaquim de Almeida (The Burning Plain, 24), while supermodel-turned actress Rachel Hunter (A Walk in the Park) and Showtime’s L Word pin-up girl Leisha Hailey turn their usual roles upside down. The film also features an original guitar score composed and performed on-screen by Ian Ball of the indie-rock band Gomez (now on world tour).

La Cucina is a brief slice of life—a look at four people trying, just like the rest of us, to figure out what makes a relationship work. In neighboring apartments, two conversations go late into the night. Downstairs, Lily (Hendricks), young and sure of herself but barely able to make a salad, squares off in an emotional duel with the dashing Michael (Almeida), who is older and worldlier than she—both in the kitchen and in matters of romance. Can they trust each other? Is their unmistakable attraction the start of a casual adventure or the chance for something deeper? In the kitchen above, the very pregnant Shelly (Hailey) is terrified that becoming a mother will drive away her husband and has stormed out of their place after a culinary disaster. She’s gone to see her lesbian friend Jude (Hunter), sure that this magnificent cook who’s been in a long-term relationship has it all figured out. But as Shelley pours out her fears and Jude prepares a sumptuous feast for a lover whose attentions turn out to be elsewhere, it soon becomes clear that both women have secrets they’d rather not reveal.

Delving into the tangled web of attraction, lust, commitment, marriage, betrayal, insecurity, affection and hope, La Cucina also reminds us, in mouthwatering detail, that food and love go hand in hand.

Directed by Allison Hebble and Zed B. Starkovich, La Cucina is winner of the awards for Best Feature at the Los Angeles Backlot Film Festival and Beloit International Film Festival, and for Best Screenplay at the Bragacine International Film Festival in Portugal. The film was also an official selection of the Hollywood International Film Festival and LA Femme Film Festival.

Her voluptuous curves are a winning feature of the cult series Mad Men. It’s all bullet bras, big mouths, and hot-shot executives untrammelled by modern taboos. Meet the new stars who are steaming up our screens.

Mad Men is television au point. The look is good; the actors are sexy; the writing is neat. When Roger Sterling, the head of Sterling Cooper, the fictional Kennedy-era advertising agency where the show is based, takes his bosomy, red-headed secretary, Joan, to a nearby hotel for a lunchtime screw, he motions to the food they’ve ordered on room service. “Look,” he says, “we’ve got oysters rockefeller, beef wellington, napoleons. If we leave this lunch alone, it’ll take over Europe.”

Simply: the show smokes. So much so that when the first series aired in 2007, it scooped an Emmy for best drama straight out of the blocks. At a mere $2.3m an episode — rival shows run to tens of millions — it also put its network, the rather dusty cable channel AMC, instantly on the map. The second series made it a cult hit among “intellectual people”, says Vincent Kartheiser, a slim, fishy boy who plays a spoilt young executive who has disappointed his smart Upper East Side family by going into advertising. “You watch it for an aesthetic. The amazing scheme of art. The details on set. The writing, the slow character progression. It’s like a novel. It’s for people who don’t watch a lot of TV.”

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.

• The new series of Mad Men will begin on January 27 on BBC Four

© TimesOnline

» EXPRESS: Joan went through some pretty tough things last season, including rape. What’s up this season?
» HENDRICKS: People said season two was darker than season one, but they may find that the new episodes have more humor than they’re expecting.

» EXPRESS: Does Joan wield power with her butt-hugging frocks and snug sweaters?
» HENDRICKS: I think Joan would be powerful regardless of her outfits. She’s a woman who is not ashamed to use everything that she’s got.

» EXPRESS: Does the roll come on with the girdles and pointy bras?
» HENDRICKS: Wardrobe, hair and makeup help any actor, because all of a sudden you’re in disguise, in another person’s clothes. It also helps to walk onto the set and be surrounded by things that look like the ’60s.

» EXPRESS: Is the 1960s underwear as uncomfortable as it looks?
» HENDRICKS: In season one, it was a bigger deal getting in and out of the stuff. Now it’s second nature. But at the end of a day in a girdle, you think, “My back hurts. My waist hurts.”

» EXPRESS: Do any shows or movies from the 1960s inspire you?
» HENDRICKS: I never wanted to be a 1960s actress playing someone in the ’60s, since there’re such different acting styles through the decades. But I have watched things like Days of Wine and Roses to be inspired.

» EXPRESS: What’s it like to use old technology like typewriters on set?
» HENDRICKS: It’s funny, there’s always someone to show you what to do, but we did get this big, old copy machine on one episode last season, and it was ridiculously foreign. It’s funny to be using something like that, and to look over and see Elisabeth Moss [who plays her co-worker Peggy] sending text messages!

» EXPRESS: And you wear vintage clothes in your real life, too?
» HENDRICKS: I’ve worn vintage since I was 12 years old, so I’ve always loved it. But now I’ve learned to appreciate the 1960s on me. Before, I used to be attracted to things from the 1920s and 1940s for the romance, feminine lace and bows.

» EXPRESS: What else do you like to put on off-screen?
» HENDRICKS: In fashion, I’m quite eclectic because I like the idea of becoming who I want to be each day. One day, I might be dressed in a feminine, proper dress; the next, I might wear a T-shirt and rock ‘n’ roll jeans.

» EXPRESS: Do you ever mix up Mad Men – style cocktails after work?
» HENDRICKS: I was just saying to my fiance that it’d be nice to make a signature cocktail when people come over. But I’m lazy — I just open champagne.

© ExpressNightOut.com

Needless to say I don’t think we’ll have to post a Spoiler Alert warning for things that lie ahead on the series, but maybe one just for things that have happened already – for those of you that need to catch up on one or two seasons’ worth of adultery and martinis. We had a chance to talk to the lovely Christina Hendricks, who plays the Monroe-esque Joan Holloway.

Being that this is IGN TV, we had to bring up the fact that we loved her on Firefly. “I think you guys (Firefly fans) are truly incredible,” Hendricks said warmly. “I was just talking about some of the Browncoats this afternoon actually because a bunch of people went to Comic-Con and they were talking about Comic-Con,” she continued. “Way to represent, you guys! I love it. It’s awesome.”

Last season on Mad Men we experienced actual historic events and saw how they affected the people of the era and the workers in Sterling Cooper; with the crash of Flight 1, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the death of Marilyn Monroe all appearing during that season’s timeline. With Monroe’s death touching Hendricks’ character specifically, could we expect more historic touchstone happenings in Season 3? “I think that you do a show that is taking place in a different time period those things are going to constantly effect people the way everything effects us today,” dodged Hendricks. “Season 2 was a really hard year for Joan. A really hard year,” Hendricks stated. “But I think some of your questions about her will be answered very quickly at the beginning of the season. You won’t have to wait a long time, like sometimes you do on Mad Men. You’ll get some answers coming up quickly.”

Hendricks admitted that being on a show that takes such meticulous care in re-creating the environment of the era can also be a learning experience. “It’s more of the things that happen on a day to day basis,” Hendricks said, “like you pick something up on a desk and you think ‘huh, I didn’t realize that they had that kind of stapler then’ or ‘I didn’t realize that white-out wasn’t invented back then.’” She also mentioned that she’s constantly stimulated by the things around her due to the amazing sets and costumes.

“Every scene on the show takes place on a specific day in history,” said Rich Sommer, who plays Madison Avenue’s father-to-be, Harry Crane, speaking to the show’s authenticity. “Even if someone’s in the background reading a newspaper, if you were to walk up to it you would see that it was the date of the day on the show,” added Aaron Staton, who plays aspiring short story writer, Ken Cosgrove. Staton then went on to add that being on the show was a much more focused way of learning history of the time. Because the show features specific days and events, the “history” on the show isn’t just a broad overview of the decade, but a much more focused study.

When we last saw Harry Crane, he was welcoming a newborn baby. How will we find him in Season 3? “I think you’re going to see an affected man,” tip-toed Sommer. “You’ll see a guy who went through all those things and, without giving away where they are now, well you’ll see how those things affect him.”

Michael Gladis, Rich Sommer and Aaron Staton at the TCA Press Tour.
What’s been Hendricks’ favorite scene on Mad Men thus far? “I think one of my favorite scenes for the show was in Season 1,” Hendricks shared. “I really loved the episode called ‘Babylon’ which had a lipstick scene which is one of my favorites. Because it had the guys on one side of the glass and the girls on one side and it was very sexually charged and it showed the office politics. And I thought it really defined what you were going to see in this show. It was just a really sexy, naughty, inappropriate scene.”

© IGN.com

Christina Hendricks, TV’s retro-sexy secretary, on living in a Mad Men’s world.

“Go home. Take a paper bag and cut some eyeholes out of it,” the bombshell supervisor says to the dowdy new girl. “Put it over your head, get undressed, and look at yourself in the mirror. Really evaluate where your strengths and weaknesses are. And be honest.”

Two years ago, this is how we first met secretary-pool diva Joan Holloway on AMC’s Mad Men. Since then, she hasn’t just endured the sixties sexism of that Madison Avenue advertising office, she’s enforced it, wielding her looks like a cop swinging a baton. As office manager, she chastens her charges, sleeps with her married boss, and cruelly mocks a white co-worker for dating a black woman. For all this—not in spite of it—she has become TV’s unlikeliest heroine.

“Drinking and smoking and having sex with other people’s wives and all those things—they are bad, bad behaviors,” says Christina Hendricks, who plays Joan. “But it’s all done with fabulous clothes and lighting and excellent music, and that makes for a really sexy show. Being bad is sexy.”

Which is kind of the point of Mad Men. Bad is sexy. And then just very, very bad. The show lures you in with a glittering surface, but just below is a hothouse of homophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, and a more general and crushing sense of isolation. Joan embodies all of the show’s brazen contradictions, strutting and posing no matter how awful or retrograde the circumstances. And yet, with less screen time than the other main characters, Joan has broken out as the show’s most seductive player. Part of the allure is her retro-bodacious beauty—obviously attractive to men, straight and gay (she’s hot and campy), and oddly empowering to women. “Joan has one of those characters based on strength,” says Mad Men creator Matt Weiner. “Even her roommate says to her, ‘You are so upbeat despite what happens.’ ”

“On a show where so many of the women seem like victims, crying in the bathroom, to see a woman holding her head up high and being witty and kinda running the show is fun,” says Hendricks. “People love Joan’s clothes first of all. But they also love her spirit, so I get a lot of you-go-girl reactions. Which is funny since I shudder sometimes when I see the script, thinking, ‘I can’t believe I have to say this!’ ”

Joan’s occasionally withering pizzazz was showcased in season one. She wrapped her silver-fox married boss Roger Sterling (John Slattery) around her finger while keeping the secretaries in line—a goddess of mid-century Manhattan with an ass that literally makes male co-workers stand up and salute. As Hendricks points out, “When Joan is walking somewhere, she always knows that at least one person is watching her. That changes how you behave, because she wants to make sure at least one person’s watching her.”

Early in the much darker season two, a male ad writer asks another if Joan is a Marilyn Monroe type. “Well, Marilyn is really a Joan.” By the end of the season, Marilyn has committed suicide, devastating Joan. Her driver’s license (age: a mortifying 31) ends up on the office bulletin board. She temporarily fills an ad job, performs brilliantly—and the job goes to a guy. She fires a young, uppity new secretary—only to see the woman sweet-talk her way back into the office and into Roger’s bed, publicly undermining Joan’s authority. And in the penultimate episode of the season, her doctor-fiancé rapes her. “Every time I got the script, I was like, ‘Poor Joan!’ ” says Hendricks.

“Joan is a story of a generation,” says Weiner. “Our moms had friends like her—very confident and sexy and they got punished for it. She has the confidence of a man and that’s really hurt her.”

The rape was a shocker—but the audience reactions were perhaps more disturbing. “What’s astounding is when people say things like, ‘Well, you know that episode where Joan sort of got raped?’ Or they say rape and use quotation marks with their fingers,” says Hendricks. “I’m like, ‘What is that you are doing? Joan got raped!’ It illustrates how similar people are today, because we’re still questioning whether it’s a rape. It’s almost like, ‘Why didn’t you just say bad date?’ ”

The scene was polarizing, sparking heated online debates in which some questioned Joan’s reaction (she and her fiancé head off for dinner afterward) while others wondered whether Joan would understand that it was rape, a taboo subject in 1962. Labels aside, Hendricks says Joan knew what was going on. “She’s smart. She’d think it was awful and ‘Holy shit!’ But she also thinks, ‘Pick yourself up, comb your hair. You’ve got a dinner reservation; don’t be a baby. You know many girls this has happened to.’ ”

Joan was controversial from the start. When Hendricks got the pilot script, she was immediately attracted to the character. Her agents were appalled. Hendricks had worked her way up from model to occasional TV parts to a breakout part on Joss Whedon’s Firefly. They urged her to take a role in a more mainstream show that, Hendricks admits, “flat-out paid more. They scolded me: ‘Are you serious? Honey, it’s AMC!’ ” Hendricks took the role; her agents dropped her.

What do agents know? The actress and Joan have exploded. Hendricks just wrapped a lead role opposite Emily Mortimer in the upcoming film Leonie. Online, you can download Joan paper dolls; obsessively debate her clothing, makeup, and hair choices; or read an unauthorized blog called What Would Joan Holloway Do? (Advice: “Men like it when you smoke their brand.”) It all adds up to a larger-than-life glamour that can prove overwhelming off-camera. “I’m a lot more girly than Joan. When I’m her, the register of my voice drops significantly,” says Hendricks, who adds that fans are surprised when they meet her. “They say, ‘But you’re so sweet!’ or ‘You don’t intimidate me at all!’ or ‘You’re not that tall!’ ” More bewildering is the attention paid to Hendricks’s curves. “I’ve been on TV shows for years and no one said a word about it. All of a sudden everyone says, ‘Oh, it must be so great to be on a show from the sixties, because now you can be on TV.’ It’s strange how astounded people are that I have breasts.”

© NYMag.com

Christina Hendricks Isn’t All That Fussy

Christina graces the pages of the September issue of Esquire magazine. The photoshoot is one of my favorites, if not my new ultimate fave!

The woman who plays the fastidious Miss Holloway on Mad Men discusses (pleasantly, more or less) her character, her character’s undergarments, and the considerable joys of quality meats

Despite the Golden Globes, the endless doxologies from critics, and the blandishments from members of its cult who tell you that you of all people would love it because it’s so smart — there’s a chance you haven’t seen Mad Men, which enters its third season this month. And if you haven’t seen Mad Men, then you can’t understand the totality of Christina Hendricks. On the show, she plays a 1960s secretary, her relentless curves tamped into tight dresses and her hair architected into a copper ziggurat. She bosses around the other girls in the office and electrifies the men who run it, just by sashaying down the hall. The pieces that make up her presence — her voice, smooth as the highway; the look in her eyes, sweet or cunning or both; the way she glides around the office, presiding — make her tower over everyone around her, whether she’s wearing heels or not.

Here, in a hotel restaurant in Los Angeles, the elements are the same — the red hair, the pristine, pale swath of skin between her shoulders, the long legs, the doe eyes. But the hair is loose, pinned up in a hurry. There’s a high-pitched laugh. The thirty-four-year-old actress is sitting comfortably in jeans and a loose top, in a private dining room, at a long table that’s set for ten. It’s an odd time to eat — three on a Saturday — but Christina’s day is just beginning. Shooting for Mad Men ran late last night, and she went to bed close to sunrise.

CHRISTINA HENDRICKS [scanning the menu]: It looks like a lot of food, but I have to assume they’re smaller portions, right? [To the waitress] I’m going to do the celery soup and then the carbonara.

WAITRESS: The celery soup is not vegetarian. It has some pancetta, and guanciale. And the carbonara is served classic style, with egg yolk. So when you mix it, it cooks itself. We can skip the egg yolk.

Hendricks blinks. She has a talent for delicate blinking — she blinks to communicate. When she does it on Mad Men, it usually means she has just made a stinging comment that’s lingering in the smoke-filled air while she blinks innocently, her eyelids crushing some hapless officemate. But in real life, it’s nice, for the most part.

CH: No, no, that’s okay.

The waitress leaves.

CH: “Would you like a carbonara without the carbonara?”

ESQUIRE: She was concerned about a lot of things.

CH: And two kinds of pork in one soup? Bring it on. I just learned what guanciale is, when I was in New Orleans. It’s the pig jowl. I went to this butcher there, and I came home with lots of sausages: a big andouille and a blood sausage.

ESQ: You know your pork.

CH: I can see it in Esquire — “I know my pork!” Oh, my gosh, you’ve had chocolate-covered bacon, right? It’s so perfect.

ESQ: Do you like to cook?

CH: I love to cook. I just got a deep fryer, and it’s amazing. The first night we got it, we made homemade poppers. I mean, what’s the best deep-fried thing ever? Cheese poppers.

ESQ: Do you drink while you cook? Watching Mad Men always makes me want to drink.

CH: I love cocktails. My specialty drink is a gimlet with a little egg white in it so it gets frothy. I really like rose water — sometimes I’ll add it to champagne. I was at a bar recently and the manager came up to me and said, “We have a drink named after you!” The Joan Holloway. There was Campari in it. People are throwing these Mad Men — themed parties because, I think, it’s an excuse to get dressed up and drink and smoke.

ESQ: What do you smoke on the set?

CH: Herbal cigarettes. They’re disgusting.

ESQ: Do you wear the undergarments of the day?

CH: Oh, yeah, they’re all the authentic girdles, and we wear the longline bras, with boning.

ESQ: Boning?

CH: It’s like what’s in a corset — it has these long strips of plastic or metal that keep everything [pauses], you know. Oh, yeah — it’s supercomfortable. And then the authentic stockings, with the garters, and then a slip and then our dress. From my girdle and my garters last night, I have two bruises on the top of my legs. From being in it for seventeen hours. Women did that.

ESQ: Why do you think you got the part of the bossy secretary?

CH: Matt Weiner, the creator, had thought of Joan as pinched and tightly wound, but she’s more of a sort of sexual character. I just went in and did the character as I had read her, which was bossy, brassy, everyone-listen-to-me. And then when wardrobe got involved, doing the pilot, I put on this dress, and all of the sudden I had a different walk than I normally had, and Matt turned to me and said, “That’s Joan.” I have my hair brought up a couple inches, and I have heels. I look like an Amazon.

ESQ: But you seem to embrace the fact that you’re not this little waify nothing.

CH: This is the way I’m built, and I feel beautiful. It’s funny, because I don’t feel like I look that different from anybody. Everyone’s always like, “You’re so much smaller in person!”

ESQ: Must be the boning.

CH: And the bras and all that.

ESQ: Even besides Joan, the show drips with sex.

CH: Because there’s something in what you don’t see. There’s restraint. I’ve had people say to me, “My husband and I watch it and we always have sex afterwards.” I think it’s really hot that some of the things it’s stirring up in people are very naughty things.

The waitress asks how everything is and Hendricks is honest. She says the noodles are overcooked. While blinking.

CH: I have this habit of, when they ask me if it was good, I tell them when it’s not.

ESQ: I think they’d want to know.

CH: I don’t mean to cause a ruckus. They’re probably saying “God, that girl from Mad Men is so fussy.”

ESQ: Are you a ruckus-causer?

CH: I have a problem keeping my mouth shut. I usually speak my mind. I’m trying to learn my lesson.

© Esquire

“Christina Hendricks, Elisabeth Moss and January Jones were all given substantial work and they were flawless,” says Ryan. “The title may be Mad Men, but the show has given us some of the most complex and compelling female characters on television.”

Judging by the critical acclaim it received, there was no sophomore slump with AMC’s 2008 drama Emmy winner, Mad Men.

“There was enormous pressure to do the near-impossible, which was be better than season one, sustain both the hype and the acclaim, plus add viewers,” says San Francisco Chronicle critic Tim Goodman. “I was worried (creator) Matthew Weiner might implode. But the very first episode of season two proved nobody had to worry, the genius was still there.”

Asked to pick a favorite scene from last season, Goodman votes for “Don walking into the Pacific Ocean, a kind of baptism, cleansing and rebirth all in one. Just beautifully conceived and shot and so anti-Mad Men in that it wasn’t an interior shot with stark blacks and immaculate suits.”

Chicago Tribune critic Maureen Ryan was also taken with the California storyline, beginning with episode “The Jet Set.”

“When Don visited the ‘real’ Mrs. Draper, it showed a side of him we hadn’t seen, a more relaxed and vulnerable aspect of his personality,” Ryan notes. “It was not only fascinating to see that part of Don’s ‘secret,’ it was another opportunity to appreciate Jon Hamm’s finely calibrated performance. No matter what era of Don’s life is depicted, he makes each iteration of the man slightly different, yet the character remains consistent.”

Another second-season strong point for critics was seeing the female characters get their due.

“Christina Hendricks, Elisabeth Moss and January Jones were all given substantial work and they were flawless,” says Ryan. “The title may be Mad Men, but the show has given us some of the most complex and compelling female characters on television.”

Not every moment was perfect. Ryan’s least favorite seg involved Draper and Bobbi Barrett.

“I didn’t feel actress Melinda McGraw and Hamm had any chemistry,” Ryan says. “Perhaps that was supposed to reinforce the idea Don could be emotionless and cold at times, but that side of him is less interesting, and I found those scenes fairly repetitive.”

Goodman says he was only irked with one thing: the inconsistent use of music. “If it’s going to use contemporary music (like the Cranberries or the Decemberists), then it needs to use them a lot,” he says. “Either period music or not, or a roughly even split. The contemporary stuff really jars.”

But, adds Goodman, if one is nitpicking about music, “the rest of it must be damned great.”

© Variety