By now, Christina Hendricks is comfortable being uncomfortable. For the better part of eight years, the actor contorted herself into waist-nipping dresses and stiffly boned undergarments to play Joan Holloway, the smokeshow secretary of Mad Men who’d flick away admirers with the swish of a wrist. And years on from the HBO show’s 2015 finale, Hendricks remains an enduring emblem of girdled glamour and Sixties sass. The Victorian corsets worn by her latest character, then, were no sweat.
“Honestly, I could wear a corset every day of my life,” the 48-year-old laughs over a video call she joined as “Christina’s iPhone”. She’s in frosty Ireland on location for Chris O’Dowd’s comedy-drama Small Town, Big Story, and swaddled in a soft knitted sweater with a bird embroidered on the chest. Her copper red hair, as much a part of her Mad Men image as her silver tongue and signature sashay, is piled into a bun (not a beehive, mind you). A couple of ringlets have come loose. “People always think I’m going to be much more proper… more of a lady,” she says. “And then they realise that I’m goofy and a bit of a nerd. I mean, I can be a lady but that’s not really who I am.”
