Zosia Mamet gets candid about the tense confrontation very early in her career that made her quit “one of the biggest shows on television” in her essay collection, Does This Make Me Funny?
Mamet recalls how the experience of playing a recurring character on an unnamed TV phenomenon evolved into a nightmare in an excerpt published by The Hollywood Reporter.
“The show’s creator and showrunner was an intense human,” wrote Mamet. “The showrunner wasn’t always around, but when he was, the entire vibe of the set would change, as if a cold front had swept the soundstage. I never entirely understood why. He was definitely spirited and opinionated, but there’s way worse than that in Hollywood. I had always thought there was maybe something I was missing. I was correct.”
Mamet then recounted blocking rehearsal for a scene that would end up being one of her last. It involved removing photos from a manila envelope and placing them on a table.
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“We’re rehearsing, I walk in, I go to take the photos out of the envelope, and the showrunner calls ‘Cut.’ Not the director of the episode, the showrunner,” she wrote. “And we all look at each other like, ‘Did somebody do something wrong?’ We all thought the scene was going fine.”
She claims the showrunner then slowly walked over to her and asked, “What the f— are you doing?” To which she replied, “Um…rehearsing?”
She continued, “He grabs my hand that’s holding the manila envelope and he says, ‘No! What the f— are you doing with this! That’s not how you take something out of an envelope! Do it again!'”
She claims they repeated the scene several times, while the showrunner berated her with phrases including, “You’re doing it wrong!,” “How the f— can you think that looks right at all?” “I don’t understand — when I cast you, you knew how to act,” and “I’m honestly confused at how you can be so bad at this.”
Mamet wrote, “Eventually he gave up or got bored. But this lasted for about a half hour. And nobody stopped it. Everyone just stared at their shoes while he screamed at me.”
The Girls actress said they eventually got through rehearsal and shot the scene. After leaving for the day, she called her agents to quit the show.
Though Mamet never names the showrunner, the show, or any of its stars, fans immediately got to speculating and singled out Mad Men and Matthew Weiner as likely candidates.
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Mamet joined the show for a recurring gig when it was already acclaimed and heavily awarded, she wrote. Indeed, Mad Men was already an Emmy-winning series when she came aboard in season 4. The actress also noted that her first episode on the show was directed by one of the series stars: her first episode, “The Rejected,” was helmed by Roger Sterling himself, John Slattery.
Additionally, the details of Mamet’s manila envelope scene line up perfectly with her last appearance on the show, which saw her character Joyce, a photographer who befriends Elizabeth Moss’ Peggy, show off a series of graphic photos from a brutal crime scene.
Representative for Weiner and Mamet did not immediately respond to Entertainment Weekly‘s requests for comment.
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Since the conclusion of Mad Men, Weiner has faced allegations of sexual harassment and workplace misconduct from his former personal assistant and staff writer, Kater Gordon. Fellow Mad Men writer and consulting producer Marti Noxon later stated her belief of Gordon’s claims, calling Weiner an “emotional terrorist” who “can not help but create an atmosphere where everyone is constantly off guard and unsure where they stand.”
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Weiner has strongly denied the claims.
“The allegations are not true, and [this] is a very important topic and a topic that I have devoted — it has been an obsession of mine, in my work and in my life, for like 92 hours of the show; we wanted people to be having this conversation,” he said at the time.
