While Kiernan Shipka appreciates the Mad Men team for trying to shield her from the show’s adult content as a child actor, she admits she kind of understood what was going on at the time.
The actress recently appeared on the Dinner’s On Me podcast, where she looked back at starring in the hit series as Sally Draper at just six years old. However, she told host Jesse Tyler Ferguson that she actually remembers nearly everything from her time on Mad Men, which ran for seven seasons.
“I don’t know if it was because my brain and body just decided to remember, like, audition, first day, whole thing,” Shipka explained. “I’m glad for that. I mean, I’m sure there’s some days that are a blip, but that’s kind of everything.”
Though her onscreen parents Don and Betty Draper (played by Jon Hamm and January Jones, respectively) didn’t do a great job of setting a good example for her young character, Ferguson recalled Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner once saying that Shipka’s character “saw everything, but Kiernan didn’t see much.”
“I was reacting to, like, Jon playing Words with Friends on his phone as an eye line and not the real deal,” Shipka remembered as an example, adding that she “definitely had context” for scenes she was in.
“They were so protective over me and my kind of innocence and not exposing me to stuff that, you know, was sensitive or more adult,” she said. “I always knew what I was reacting to. Like, I always knew what I was walking in on. I just didn’t have to see it over and over again.”
The Sweethearts actress continued, “I think at a certain point, I was like, ‘Guys, I know what this is. Like, I’m good. I’m fine.’ But I really, like, admire and respect the way that they handled it. But I do think in my head, I was probably like, ‘I’m mature. I’m an adult. I know what’s going on here. Like, it’s fine, guys.’”
Later in the podcast, Shipka shared that she wasn’t allowed to see most of the Mad Men episodes as a child, aside from season premiere screenings. But she finally watched the entire series during the COVID-19 pandemic, right before she turned 21 years old, which she described as an eye-opening experience.
“I was watching [Sally] go through stuff that at the time [of filming] I was feeling in a really natural way,” the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina alum explained. “But now as sort of an adult, I can psychoanalyze and go, ‘Oh, no, she was grieving there and acting out.’ And at the time, I think I understood her as much as she understood herself. And as I get older, I kind of understand her the way that I hope she, you know, would understand herself one day with therapy. And there’s something really wild about seeing that because it was like, it wasn’t that I didn’t know what was going on, but I didn’t know what was going on the way that we don’t know what’s going on with us until later too.”
The Emmy-winning series centered on one of New York City’s most prestigious ad agencies at the beginning of the 1960s, including the firm’s most mysterious but extremely talented ad exec, Don Draper.
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