Eyes of Mad Men II
From Don and Betty’s Paradise Lost by Bruce Handy in Vanity Fair:
January Jones on playing Elisabeth Draper:
A lot of what I do with Betty is in the eyes. A lot of the feelings are unspoken, so that’s kind of been fun to play with.
Alan Taylor, a Sopranos director who directed the Mad Men pilot and was involved in casting Jon Hamm as Don Draper:
It was a wonderful turning point when we put him through the process of hair and makeup, and the first tiwe saw him with his haircut and his suit, all the women in the office kind of wilted and fainted when he walked by. He was this wonderful icon of maleness, and it took us almost that long to catch up to the fact that it was perfect to cast sort of the perfect male in this part, because what we were doing [in the show] was basically deconstructing that. I mean, that’s just one layer of what he brought. Obviously the other thing that made us go back to him again and again was this wonderful sadness and lost quality in his eyes. It’s a rare quality for someone who’s a strapping leading man.
How brilliant it is to read that my initial impressions were not governed by mere happenstance, but the astute creators and the uncanny talent of such people as January Jones.
