She's Betty's best friend. So what if she chain smokes while pregnant? Actor Anne Dudek gets inside the mind of Mad Men's neighbor with an edge.

Q: How weird was it to be playing a character that is smoking and drinking while she's visibly pregnant?

A: Super weird. I've grown up thinking that's the worst thing you could ever do. Playing the scene is not that weird because to Francine, she's not doing anything wrong at all. She's not knowingly harming her little fetus. That's the thing people comment to me most about my character. They laugh really hard, and they'll say, "Oh, that's so terrible!" They find it funny and sickening, and they really want to talk about it. That also speaks to people's wistful attitude. If only we could do things like that and they wouldn't have a negative effect on us. If only people could drink and smoke, and nothing bad happened. How horrible and sad and funny that it did happen and that people could ever live not knowing that.

Continue reading "Q&A: Anne Dudek (Francine Hanson)" »

Actor Mark Moses talks about growing up as the son of an ad man and addresses the questions surrounding his character, the hard-charging new addition at Sterling Cooper.

Q: How difficult was it to put yourself in the mindset of 1960?

A: Actually, my father was an advertising man on Madison Avenue in the '60s. He sold advertising for the Chicago Sun-Times, and he kind of lived the life that those guys were living on Mad Men. I grew up with guys like Duck Phillips and Don Draper.

Q: What did your father tell you about that era and the advertising industry then?

A: I asked him about Duck Phillips coming from England, and he said, "Well, he's going to have a Tattersall vest," and I showed up on the set and I had a Tattersall vest. He knew about hats: how he wore his hat, what he did with it... He had to make sure that he could sit in the automobile with his hat on. It was one of the prerequisites for buying an automobile. My dad has so many stories of guys who couldn't make the sale and ended up just crashing. Their lives were ruined because they just couldn't keep up with sales. They couldn't keep up with the young bucks; they couldn't keep up with the advertising world. It was a hard world to live in. They drank a lot, they smoked a lot, and there were a lot of casualties from it. These were my father's colleagues, and they were very, very entertaining men. My parents would always say the best parties were either with actors or salesmen because they had great stories.

Continue reading "Q&A: Mark Moses (Duck Phillips)" »