Christina Hendricks

The Hair Dye That Fooled Hollywood

Christina Hendricks spent ten years working the runways and photo studios before a casting director took her acting ambitions seriously. She entered the fashion world out of financial necessity and ended up living in cities like London and New York, while her agency kept telling her not to lose weight. Her figure never fit the beauty standards of the time.

Her red hair was a teenage decision inspired by a book about Anne of Green Gables.

In 1999, she landed her first speaking role on the MTV series Undressed. But steady contracts didn't come easily. She had to string together pilots that never made it to air or recurring guest roles in minor productions while working as a receptionist to pay the rent on her apartment in Los Angeles.

In 2002, she appeared in Firefly, a cult science fiction series in which she played Saffron. Her character was a professional con artist who used her looks to disarm the main characters. It was the first time critics noticed her ability to handle irony and danger beneath a veneer of apparent fragility.

The Office That Changed Everything

In 2007, the script for Mad Men landed in her hands. Joan Holloway was not a lead character in Matthew Weiner's original plans, but Hendricks' physical presence and the way she carried herself on set led the writers to rethink the importance of the head secretary at the Sterling Cooper agency.

And the gamble paid off.

Over the show's seven seasons, she received six consecutive Emmy nominations. She never took the statuette home. But her performance as Joan Holloway undermined the idea that a body outside Hollywood's standards could not carry a complex, dramatic storyline on prestige television.

In 2011, she made the leap to art-house cinema with Drive, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. It was a brief, brutal role that helped shake off her sixties image and showed she could thrive in much darker settings. She reunited with the Danish director in 2016 for The Neon Demon, where she played a icy modeling agency boss.

The Fallout From the Cancellation

In 2018, Hendricks returned to the spotlight on television with Good Girls. For four seasons, she played Beth Boland, a housewife who ends up leading a money-laundering ring. The series mixed dark comedy with crime drama and allowed her to explore a far more aggressive and cynical register than her earlier work.

NBC canceled the show in 2021 due to budget problems and alleged internal tensions among the main cast.

In 2023, she joined the cast of The Buccaneers as Mrs. St. George in a period drama filmed entirely in Scotland. That same year, she voiced a character in the animated series Solar Opposites and worked on the shoot of Small Town Pot in various locations across Canada.

In 2024, Netflix confirmed her casting in The House of Guinness, created by Steven Knight. Production began in the United Kingdom, with a production design recreating 19th-century Dublin and a budget of more than six million euros per episode.