Was Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka the best child actor ever?
Many children wilt under the pressure of acting in a major film or TV show. Not so Shipka, who played Sally Draper in Mad Men
Today’s instalment of The Chimera contains spoilers for Mad Men seasons one to four, as well as vile slanders aimed at both Star Wars fans and AJ Soprano.
First up, I realise that headline makes it sound like Kiernan Shipka is dead, or something – she’s not, of course, but she is no longer a child actor. Shipka is now 24 years old, and well established, appearing in this year’s Twisters and Longlegs, and having starred in Netflix flagship The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina from 2018-2020. But Shipka’s first major role was as Don and Betty Draper’s daughter Sally in Mad Men; she was seven when the pilot aired in July 2007, fifteen when the credits finally rolled on Don, Peggy, Roger, Joan and co, and she quietly became one of the best parts of an already brilliant show.1
Consider the child actor, as a tradition. In most TV shows and films, very young actors are either used as props – as little more than dressing for a scene, rarely required to do anything more than run around or perhaps cry – or else they’re given responsibility and real lines to deliver. And they inevitably ruin things. That’s not their fault, of course.2 But it’s a fact of life that a bad child actor can ruin an otherwise promising production.
One need only take a look at Star Wars’s Jake Lloyd, who played a young Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace back in 1998, to see why it’s a problem to put too much weight on such young shoulders. Lloyd’s has long been considered the ne plus ultra of bad performances by on-screen kids. And sure, he’s a little self-serious and stilted on screen, as children tend to be when they try to talk like adults – after all, Lloyd was barely ten when the film came out (perhaps more importantly, his performance was utterly hamstrung by George Lucas’s famous inability to write dialogue that any real human would ever speak). By the time The Phantom Menace hit cinemas, hardcore Star Wars fans – hardly the most reasonable people even at the best of times – had been waiting for nearly 16 years for a new film. When it sucked – and don’t listen to the revisionists, it fucking sucks – a certain cadre of man-children within the fandom blamed an actual child: the ten-year-old Lloyd.
Lloyd is now 35, and over the past couple of decades he’s given several very negative interviews in which he basically says the backlash to Menace ruined his childhood. In 2009, he told a shit-eating Australian showbiz reporter at a sci-fi convention that acting was “pretty well behind me” and that he was “not a big fan of cameras any more”. Lloyd stonewalled frostily when asked if he had kept any paraphernalia from his time in Star Wars, or whether he was in touch with any of the old cast: “I disappeared, on purpose. I do these [conventions] maybe once or twice a year. ”
Since then, Lloyd’s life has been increasingly troubled. By his early 20s, he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and was experiencing hallucinations. In 2015, he was arrested for dangerous driving, and the same year he allegedly assaulted his mother, who later stated that he had been diagnosed as schizophrenic. Last year, he was hospitalised during a psychotic break.
I’m not suggesting that Lloyd’s difficulties with mental health stem directly from his time in Star Wars, nor his treatment at the hands of fans, but it’s hard not to be sympathetic to a child who suffered such serious criticisms from adults who should have known better, after being thrust into a situation that – it appears – was far beyond his abilities to cope with. I often think that child actors face a real quandary: if they’re precocious, they can come across as smarmy theatre kids (Modern Family was a great sitcom and mostly avoided this pitfall, but Rico Rodriguez’s Manny was the weak link: that kid was written as a smug creep and came off as such, especially as he got older). But if they’re bad, they just ruin the drama by sticking out like a sore thumb (cf. Jake Lloyd). And longevity in a show is even harder to achieve, because time is so much more visible on screen for kids. An adult actor can reasonably star in a series for five or even ten years and look much the same as when they started. A child or teenager cannot.
Nor do they necessarily even really want to. This was awkwardly apparent in Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, whose female lead was played by Linklater’s daughter Lorelei. Boyhood famously took 12 years to shoot, on and off – by the end, a now teenage Lorelei no longer wanted anything to do with the project, and asked her father to kill her character off. He didn’t, but frankly, you can see how little effort she’s putting in by the last few scenes of the film. “That little extrovert kid who you see singing and dancing in the early scenes?” Linklater explained ruefully in an interview. “Well, suddenly she hits puberty and everything changes.”
All of this is to emphasise quite how excellent Kiernan Shipka was in a very difficult role in Mad Men. Sally Draper is the daughter of a horribly mismatched, dysfunctional marriage, with one parent who is a habitual liar, philanderer and functioning alcoholic, and the other violently proud, irritable and childish. Over the course of the first four seasons of Mad Men, she goes from being a slightly spoiled if neglected five-year-old to a watchful girl of 11, on the edge of adolescence and gradually becoming aware – and then resentful – of her parents’ hypocrisies and deep-seated flaws. And Shipka genuinely gives a really good performance. It was recognised at the time – in 2009, she was nominated for a Young Artist Award (a sort of Bafta or Golden Globe for performers under the age of 21), and again in 2011. In 2013, she won.
Before even considering Sally’s character and development over the seasons, it’s worth noting just how well cast she is. This girl is believably the child of this man and this woman, is she not?
One of the strengths in Shipka’s performance – and there are hints that this was partly thanks to good direction – is that she seems to take difficult subject matter in her stride throughout the series. Early in season three, for example, an episodes-long storyline follows the diagnosis of Betty’s father Gene with dementia, and his eventual death. Against Don’s wishes, Gene comes to live with the Drapers as his brain deteriorates; as a result, he spends a lot of time with Sally, who understands imperfectly what is happening to him, but can see what’s around the corner with crystal clarity. Shipka’s Sally keeps different emotions in balance masterfully: love for her grandfather, fear of his new senile unpredictability, a selfish child’s impulse to take advantage of it. Sally steals $5 from Gene, and when he raises it with her parents, she denies taking the money. She soon loses her nerve, though, and pretends to “find” it on the floor of the kitchen by chance. She and her grandfather both know what has happened when she hands the money back to him, but neither acknowledges it. Later, he invites her to his bedroom, where he makes a sort of peace by asking her to read aloud to him from his copy of Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In the next episode, he dies, and the impact on Sally, and her perception of mortality, is significant.
In interviews, Shipka has spoken about how she was empowered on set to act the role as she wanted, and how she thinks that freedom might have given her the wherewithal to turn in a more natural performance than if she had been coached heavily. “I got really lucky as a kid,” she told Page Six last year. “Just to be trusted with the performance and not really doubted. And I think in turn, I just didn’t really doubt myself and I found my abilities in ways that I might not have if they were stifled or people tried to shape or shift them in some kind of way. They let me be on that set, and I’m so thankful for that.”
By the beginning of season four, almost every other episode required a performance of impressive maturity from Shipka. The show introduces a storyline where Sally – who must be what, eleven? – is caught at a sleepover by a friend’s mother doing something an eleven-year-old shouldn’t really be doing at a sleepover. Betty, ever the compassionate, understanding mother, is duly outraged and disgusted; Sally is sent to a child psychiatrist, and over the next few episodes, she and the doctor unpick the reasons why she’s acting out.
This is difficult, Freudian stuff for a kid to act! Later in the season, Sally cuts off her hair while staying at newly divorced Don’s Manhattan bachelor pad, because she wants to look pretty – like the young women her father dates, it’s implied. This happens while she’s being babysat by Don’s latest (doomed) love interest, the advertising strategist Dr Faye Miller, while Don works. When he arrives home and Faye leaves, Sally puts him on his toes. “Are you going to marry Faye?” she asks. Don demurs. “Is she your girlfriend?” Again, he acts like she’s said something surprising: “No…” But Sally doesn’t stop: “She had your keys.” Don, matter-of-fact: “I gave her my keys.” “She knew you had peanut butter.” “Everyone has peanut butter.” “Well, she said she wanted to meet me. Why would she want to meet me?”
Sally has clocked what’s going on, and Don is unprepared for it – he still thinks of her as an oblivious eight-year-old, but she manoeuvres him into having to admit that he likes Faye, using the bluff, plausibly deniable innocence that still works on him to ask some very direct questions. The next morning, a manipulative Sally makes him French toast for breakfast – with added rum. Naturally, Don loves it. She’s playing the part of a perfect daughter, but with an agenda.
At all points Shipka’s Sally is severely plausible. She has the inquisitive smarts of a nearly-teen, an embryonic but unrefined understanding of complicated adult relationships, a faux innocence that she knows works on her guilty father following his divorce, a real vulnerability stemming from a lifetime spent clashing with her unreasonable, childlike mother.3 Shipka takes all these things and rolls them into one of the most believable and developed characters in the best show on TV at the time. AJ Soprano could never.
I genuinely think there’s a good argument that Mad Men is the best series to come out of the Golden Age of TV, pipping Breaking Bad, The Wire… possibly even The Sopranos. But that’s a different blog, for another day.
It’s the fault of those vampiric parents who push their kids into Hollywood!
One of the season’s best moves was to have Betty Draper meet with the same child psychiatrist as Sally. Betty finds the psychiatrist easy to talk to; when she implies that Betty might be better off speaking to someone trained to therapize adults, Betty flinches at the idea. The show implies that she – the 30ish-year-old Betty – is as much a child as her actual children.