Bryn Mawr Grad Smokes Up the Screen
in Mad Men, TV's Hottest Summer Drama

Perhaps Maggie Siff '96 should consider investing in a television. She didn't bother to buy one when she made a temporary move from New York to Los Angeles last spring, and now she's in danger of missing the hottest new drama series of the summer season, AMC's Mad Men. Of course, Siff is a few steps ahead of the audiences and critics who have embraced the show — she learns all the plot twists weeks in advance of the Thursday-night broadcasts when she reads through the scripts to find her lines.

Siff plays Rachel Menken in Mad Men, a historical drama that follows the lives of Madison Avenue advertising executives at the smoke-filled, boozy cusp of the 1960s. Created by Sopranos veteran Matthew Weiner, the show has earned critical raves for its lush visual appeal, its meticulous attention to the period's material culture, its witty and provocative writing, and the performances of actors like Siff.

Although she has appeared in a few films and several episodes of television shows that were filmed in New York, the bulk of Siff's previous work has been on the stage, first in Philadelphia and then in New York. But she knew from her first reading of a Mad Men screenplay that this project merited a significant commitment of time and energy.

"I loved the material, and I have so much respect for Mad Men's creative team," Siff says. "From the very first, I had a gut feeling that this role was mine. Part of it is how much I love my character. I consider it my job as an actor to find a way to love all the characters I play, even those who are unattractive and hard to love. But with Rachel, it's easy."

Siff's Rachel is a client of Mad Men's Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency who hires the firm to help her move her family's Manhattan department store upmarket. The character is anomalous in several ways. In a corporate world where openly expressed anti-Semitism is the norm, Rachel is Jewish. As the CEO of a large business, she is also one of only a couple of female characters who are neither wives nor secretaries, a sort of protofeminist during an era when gender boundaries are rigidly defined and infrequently transgressed.

"Rachel is intelligent and thoughtful, very direct — a truth-teller — and also very in touch with her sexuality. She is a powerful, attractive woman who is articulate in defending her right to be that. It's hard to find a female role that has all of those characteristics. In a lot of ways, she really exemplifies what I think of as a Bryn Mawr woman."

When Siff came to Bryn Mawr from a large public high school in the Bronx, she says, "I felt like I was walking into a whole different world. It took me a while to acclimate, but I'm so glad that's what I did with my education."

While majoring in English, Siff performed in several productions of the Bryn Mawr-Haverford Theater Program, under the tutelage of Director of Theater Mark Lord.

"Mark was a wonderful mentor for me," Siff says. "I was very intensely involved in my academic work, and Mark invites students to bring to their acting everything they're thinking about and turning over in their minds. What I did with Mark didn't feel separate from my academic work."

After graduating, Siff took the Philadelphia theater community by storm, earning three nominations for Barrymore Awards in two years, including a win for best supporting actress for her portrayal of Nora in the Lantern Theater Company's production of Ghosts.

"Philadelphia is a great theater town," Siff says. "There's so much creativity there, and it was a wonderful place to get a lot of work done." Siff has performed in several Philadelphia productions with which Lord was also associated, including Big House's critically acclaimed production of The Ride Across Lake Constance at the Philly Fringe Festival in 2002.

From her Philadelphia successes, Siff moved on to the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, from which she earned an M.F.A. Back in her hometown, she has given several well-received performances. Last season, Siff earned a Jefferson Award nomination for Outstanding Leading Actress in the Goodman Theater's production of Dollhouse, Rebecca Gilman's updated version of the Ibsen stage classic. She has appeared in episodes of several TV series. Two major films in which she has roles — Michael Clayton, starring George Clooney, and And Then She Found Me, starring and directed by Helen Hunt — premiered last week at the Toronto Film Festival, and Siff is enthusiastic about her work on the soon-to-be-released Stop Loss, by Boys Don't Cry director Kimberly Pierce.

As shooting for the first season of Mad Men wraps up, Siff is looking forward to a return to present-day New York. The indoor air quality there will surely be an improvement on the smoke-filled environment of Mad Men's set, which is produced, in accordance with OSHA regulations, by herbal cigarettes whose flavor Siff characterizes as "nasty." But she has postponed her homecoming to take a recurring role in the upcoming season of the award-winning FX series Nip/Tuck. It's almost enough to provoke a burst of electronics consumerism at the plasma-screen level.

Mad Men airs on AMC on Thursday nights at 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. The series can also be downloaded through iTunes and is available on demand and in high definition, free of charge, through most cable providers.

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