Elisabeth Moss in New York Magazine Talks About Mad Men's Peggy
“She’s Jack Lemmon, she’s Ernest Borgnine in Marty, the one who is stepped on a little bit and has a really good heart,” Moss tells me. “You want her to succeed, you want her to do well. She’s definitely very ambitious, the way a lot of us are, but the last thing she would do is trample anyone to get to the top.”
It's just really interesting that she exists in the early 1960s, because she's such the fish out of water compared to office colleagues in season one. In fact, it's as if Peggy couldn't possibly remain in a secretarial role because of some thing deep in her history, her core, that we don't even know about, but it's the fact that we're not smacked in the face with, for example, a child sexual abuse flashback, that Peggy has the weight and the depth she does.
I can imagine that it might be tempting to go that route, but one of the hallmarks of this show is restraint, and in this case it makes Peggy so much more compelling.
And she looks great in that dress, huh? And Pete's such a slimeball.
