Growing up as Sally Draper gave Kiernan Shipka a strong start to her career in Hollywood, but it didn’t make for the most normal childhood.
The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina star reflected on spending her adolescence on Mad Men — and her lack of a typical schooling experience — in a conversation with Jesse Tyler Ferguson on his Dinner’s on Me podcast.”I was always on set. I stopped at first grade, so I was young,” Shipka recalled. “I graduated early. I just did the whole thing. I was sort of a little bit untethered and wandering.”
Michael Yarish/AMC/Courtesy of Everett
Shipka had to reckon with her ignorance of school culture while she shot a teen movie, requiring her to perform an unfamiliar task that most take for granted. “I didn’t know how to open a locker,” she recalled. “I was filming a high school film after Mad Men. I was like 15. They were like, ‘Okay Kiernan, you’re just going to walk down the hall and then open the locker.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, great.’ And I walked down and then I get to the locker, and I’m like, ‘Oh no, oh no, I never got to this! This isn’t part of my skill set yet, guys. Someone teach me.’”
Shipka essentially has no memories of life before her acting career. “I don’t have a reference point for what it’s like to not be in the industry or some level of public figure. I was like 6 when I started Mad Men,” she said. “Coming out of it, I was still so young that it was a little bit of finding my footing, and it was a weird time. I think it mentally, emotionally when I look back and I pinpoint what I struggled with, and I search for the ‘why,’ it was because I kind of lost this anchor in my life, and because I wasn’t in school anywhere.”
The actress also clarified that when Sally inadvertently discovered her dad Don Draper (Jon Hamm) in the midst of illicit affairs on Mad Men, she was actually seeing something very different on set. “I was reacting to Jon playing Words with Friends on his phone as an eyeline, and not the real deal,” she explained. However, she did have the necessary information to play the scene genuinely: “I definitely had context, but they were so protective over me and my kind of innocence and not exposing me to stuff that was sensitive or more adult. And I always knew what I was reacting to. I always knew what I was walking in on.”
Shipka said that she finally completed a top-to-bottom rewatch of Mad Men during the pandemic, and was intrigued by a deeper understanding of her character. “I was watching her go through stuff that at the time, I was feeling in a really natural way,” the actress remembered. “But now as an adult, I can psychoanalyze and go, ‘Oh no, she was grieving there and acting out.'”
She continued, “At the time, I think I understood her as much as she understood herself. As I get older, I understand her the way that I hope she would understand herself one day with therapy. There was something really wild about seeing that, because 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. It was mind-blowing in a way.”
