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The GQ+A: Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks on Joan’s Epic Moral Moment

A quick excerpt from GQ contributor Gwynne Watkins’s interview this week with Hendricks. The full article is here.

Christina Hendricks: It was a crazy episode the other day.

GQ: Yes it was! So tell me your reaction to first learning about that storyline. I’d imagine it’s the kind of thing that could make a person nervous.
Christina Hendricks: [Laughs] Honestly, Matt [Weiner] had told me about that storyline, I think it was either last season or the season before. He’d had it in his mind, and was planning on using it before, but the development of the characters just didn’t get to that point. So I’d had some knowledge of it for quite some time. Yeah, it makes you nervous! ‘Cause you think, well, how are people going to respond to Joan doing this? But I think Matt’s writing and the way it was done shows what people will do out of necessity and for survival. I thought it was beautifully written.

GQ: Yes. Although the episode was extremely hard to watch, I didn’t feel like the show itself was exploiting Joan; she was an active player in the events.
Christina Hendricks: You know, there’s a moment where Pete is pitching this idea, and he says, “Haven’t we all done something, made a mistake one night for free?” All the men in this office have done sort of off-color things, and acted in ways that we’ve all hissed at throughout the entire series. She acted like one of the guys, to a certain extent. And she’s a single mother. When Lane comes in [with the $50,000 offer] and she says, “It’s four times as much as I make in the entire year”—are you kidding me? How moral are we all? How much can it help my family, and how much can it help my son? And once it’s done, it’s done; it never has to be spoken about again. But it’s a terrible price to pay.

I feel the need to rewatch this episode but also a strong desire to never see it again. I haven’t felt so viscerally moved by a show since a certain death scene on The Wire.

In that all important Tetris-scape of Best Show Ever that very usefully occupies too much of my brain, there’s a lot of flipping between Mad Men, The Wire and Breaking Bad (and Arrested Development and Freaks & Geeks and The Sopranos…). After last year’s tight, expertly paced season full of wonderfully shot back stories (something about Don’s dreamy childhood remembrances, in contrast, never fully sell me, for some reason) and WHAT!!?! moments, I thought Breaking Bad had them all beat. But where that show leaves me in awe of its plot twists and surprisingly novel way of capturing a desperately flailing antihero that requires viewers to meditate on evil and existentialism in the modern age, its characters just aren’t built to devastate me as completely.

And I love the characters—and the actors playing them. I do feel for them and get immersed in their worlds of skyrocketing stakes. But they also appropriately serve as vehicles for a heavier haul: deeper questions of morality and corruption and masculinity and postmodern America.

Mad Men obviously covers significant social issues, in this episode in particular. But the show is also a character study, especially apparent in its use of amazing vignette episodes and the way certain people rotate out of its focus for weeks and as soon as they return, prompt a thrill of familiarity and nervous anticipation.

With Joan’s storyline on Sunday, my cocktail of emotions was primarily disgust-based. And not exactly with her or Jaguar dude or even smarmy Pete. I was mad at the show! At Matt Weiner. Why did they have to be so obvious with their women-as-others/objects/cars (!) theme, the three women’s too perfectly parallel experiences with objectification and ownership and power dynamics? Why did we need to see Megan’s actress friend’s ass on the meeting room table? I still haven’t sorted through exactly how I feel about the episode’s treatment of all these themes in a storytelling/stylistic sense, but the fact that I was so alarmed by it all tells me enough, in terms of show quality.

And that I probably do need to watch this hour of TV again. Dammit.