In an excerpt published in The Hollywood Reporter from her upcoming book of essays Does This Make Me Funny, Mamet recalls the thrill of being hired on one of the most critically acclaimed series on television. (She does not refer to the show or the creator by name throughout the piece.) But her first day was marred when the showrunner demanded her hair be cut into a short bob before coming to set—something that was never communicated to Mamet or the show’s head hairdresser. The hairdresser couldn’t even find scissors and ended up hacking Mamet’s hair off with a straight razor.
Despite this inauspicious start, Mamet initially enjoyed working on Mad Men, despite noticing that when the showrunner was on set “the entire vibe of the set would change, as if a cold front had swept the soundstage.” However, when she was invited back for a second season, she had an encounter that tainted the experience entirely. During a rehearsal in which she was meant to take photos out of an envelope, the showrunner—despite not being the episode’s director—called “Cut” and began berating Mamet for the way she handled the envelope. He had them try the scene again and again, each time getting angrier and louder (eventually “full‑out screaming”) as he belittled her with comments like, “I don’t understand—when I cast you, you knew how to act.” “I’m honestly confused at how you can be so bad at this.” “Did you forget how to act, Mamet?”
The incident lasted “for about a half hour. And nobody stopped it. Everyone just stared at their shoes while he screamed at me,” Mamet writes. “Eventually we finished the blocking rehearsal and shot the scene. I finished my day. I walked to my car and called my agents and told them I quit. I was supposed to do four more episodes that season, not including the one I was on, but I told them I didn’t care what they had to do, I didn’t care if the network sued me, I refused to go back on that set for one more day than I actually had to.”
Given the history, it’s unsurprising to hear that Weiner could be a tyrant. Supporting Gordon’s claims in 2017, veteran writer Marti Noxon said Weiner “is devilishly clever and witty, but he is also, in the words of one of his colleagues, an ’emotional terrorist’ who will badger, seduce, and even tantrum in an attempt to get his needs met.” She described an environment where the creative team and crew were constantly walking on eggshells, but too afraid to report his bad behavior. Perhaps fostering a hostile work environment is why Weiner hasn’t had a major project since 2018’s The Romanoffs, or perhaps there’s another reason. Either way “sometimes I think about him sitting in his office alone feeling sad and angry and anxious and wondering if everyone’s forgotten him, and for a moment it makes me feel sorry for him, feel compassion for him, hope that his life isn’t too bad…,” Mamet writes. “But let’s be real, only for a moment.”
