Hollywood actress January Jones plays the character Betty in the hit television series Mad Men. Last year, January was pregnant when it came to shooting some of the scenes for Mad Men series five and she has now opened up about how her pregnancy affected the show, and her character.
January Jones on Mad Men set
Jones told Collider, "Well, when I had told, when we found out that the season was going much later before shooting schedule for Season 5, I called [showrunner] Matthew [Weiner] when I knew that they were about to go into the writer’s room and said, ‘By the time we start shooting, I’m going to be very pregnant. So, I just don’t know how you want to write that in or write it out. If you want to hide it or make her pregnant again. Whatever you need to do.’"
She added, "He thought about it for a few days and said, ‘Well, what if, you know…’ I think he’d always wanted to do a physical change for Betty so that was just the opportunity to do it. And in reality I was only actually pregnant under the fat suit for one episode. So, I think that he just liked that storyline as well and it worked out. But it was very difficult getting bigger and having to change the fat suit and prosthetics and then getting smaller again and having to compensate the fat suit and the prosthetics. It was very challenging. It was extremely challenging just physically and time wise because I had 6 or 7 hours of prosthetics, so I’d have to arrive at work at 3 in the morning and then an hour to take it off at the end of the day. And I was nursing a baby. It was just very physically challenging and it was also physically limiting in what I could do on-screen."
January Jones as Betty in Mad Men
January continued, "The DPs and lighting everyone was very frustrated with the whole situation. I could only turn my head so much, and if I turned my body and not my head… I didn’t want to look robotic, so it was a whole new set of skills I had to learn acting wise. I felt like it was a lesson in showing emotion without moving your body or head. So it was challenging and still is. But I loved how I felt in it, too, because I just felt that it leant so much to Betty and made her a bit more sympathetic. People empathize with her a bit more, I think."
Mad Men season six is set to premiere with a double episode on Sunday, April 7.
Inside Mad Men
