Zosia Mamet’s New Book Describes ‘Mad Men’ Show Runner As Total Tyrant

Mad Men is regularly regarded as one of the greatest television shows of all time. It won 16 Primetime Emmys while it was on air and has received numerous accolades — the show is considered part of the golden age of television. But nothing great is made without a little bit (or a lot) of pressure. And sometimes, that pressure can come off a little, um, bad. 

In a new essay for The Hollywood Reporter from Zosia Mamet, best known for her role as Shoshanna on Girls, she described her time working on a set as a true horror experience. Titled “Why Zosia Mamet Quit One of the Biggest Shows on Television,” the essay is an excerpt from her upcoming book Does This Make Me Funny? It details the verbal abuse and very abrupt haircut Mamet was subjected to in service of making the show. While she didn’t explicitly name which show, it was easy to deduce that Mamet was talking about Mad Men from the details and timing of the events. 

There’s even a Reddit thread decoding all of the details:

Mamet describes going to set the very first day and having her hair abruptly chopped off with a razor. “The first day of shooting was a success, and minus my impromptu haircut, I had a blast,” Mamet writes. “One of the actors on the show was directing for the first time, and he was absolutely incredible at it.”

Mamet was thrilled to get asked back to the show for the next season. “I showed up on set for the first episode of the new season ready for anything,” Mamet continued. “If they had asked me to buzz my head I would have been cool with it. If they had asked me to get naked, I probably would have done it. I was ready to roll with whatever they threw at me. Or so I thought.”

She went on to describe the showrunner and creator as “an intense human,” and that in her prior experiences on set the “vibe” would change whenever he was present. “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,” she recalled. 

Then, there was a day that finally revealed what she was sensing before but had never witnessed. It was during a blocking rehearsal when he arrived and totally derailed things:

He gets up out of his chair at the monitors and walks toward me slowly, looking at the ground the entire time like he’s trying to figure out how to word what he’s about to say. And when he finally stops right in front of me, he takes a few more beats before he lifts his head, looks at me, and says, “What the fuck are you doing?” To which I say, “Um… rehearsing?”

And then he grabs my hand that’s holding the manila envelope and he says, “No! What the fuck are you doing with this! That’s not how you take something out of an envelope! Do it again!”

Mamet goes on to detail how this unnamed showrunner (almost certainly Matthew Weiner, the creator and show runner of Mad Men) started screaming at her for take after take for about 30 minutes straight. “Nobody stopped it. Everyone just stared at their shoes while he screamed at me. Eventually we finished the blocking rehearsal and shot the scene,” Mamet recalled. 

The experience was enough to make Mamet quit, right away. It worked out. Her next big booking was Girls, a genre and generation defining show. Still, there are some hard feelings toward the unnamed showrunner (Weiner). “I ran into that showrunner at the Emmys a few years later. Both of our shows were nominated,” Mamet wrote. “He pretended not to know who I was. They swept the awards that night and part of me resented him for that.”

You can read the entire story right here.