14 DAY TRIAL // Christina Hendricks of the “Mad Men” fame is famous both for her exquisite portrayal of Joan Holloway on the successful series and for her impressive curves. Hendricks is not big and she’s not fat and what she resents more than being asked about her weight is having her body scrutinized in the media, sometimes at the cost of her merits as an actress, she explains in the latest issue of New York magazine.
Accompanied by a stunning spread which sees Hendricks modeling underwear as outerwear, as the mag says, the piece comes to shed some light on the recent controversy around Hendricks’ body, controversy that climaxed with the New York Times calling her “a big girl.” It’s tough to see so many people paying attention to her looks instead of her acting, which is why she’s more comfortable with discussing the latter, the 34-year-old star says.
“Christina Hendricks thinks all the talk about her body is a little embarrassing. It’s not as if she has an extra limb, after all. She just has an especially attractive version of the same thing women have had forever – curves – but she happens to have them in a profession where women haven’t for quite some time. ‘It kind of hurt my feelings at first,’ she says. ‘Anytime someone talks about your figure constantly, you get nervous, you get really self-conscious. I was working my [backside] off on the show, and then all anyone was talking about was my body!’ You can see why all the focus on how big the chest, how narrow the waist, how round the hips could drive an actor – anyone – insane, but people were only noticing Christina Hendricks’s body because they were finally noticing Christina Hendricks,” the New York mag begins by saying.
And, while Hendricks admits so much attention to her body, with the ultimate end of establishing whether she’s just curvy or downright fat was unnerving, it did help her stand out from the crowd and, ironically enough, draw attention to her acting as well, the magazine goes on to point. Whether she likes it or not, the fact that she’s not stick thin means that the industry is not completely lost to size 0 and that – maybe – it’s also starting to open up to the idea of accepting regular-sized women. Whether she likes it or not, Hendricks is, in many ways, a representative for regular women in Hollywood.
“Hendricks working the Emmy’s red carpet in formfitting L’Wren Scott is terrific PR for the opinion that Hollywood success should not be determined by one’s ability to Pilates one’s hips up, off, and away. None of this is meant to suggest that Hendricks is big. She is not. (That the New York Times seemed to endorse a stylist’s description of her as ‘a big girl’ in its coverage of the Golden Globes was mystifying and strange.) It is also not to suggest that her figure is attainable to the average duck. She looks the way movie stars used to look. She is, in that sense, proof of how certain bodies go in and out of fashion,” New York writes.