Zosia Mamet has recalled an intense confrontation with a showrunner that she says made her leave one of the most popular programs on TV.
The 37-year-old actor wrote about landing a “recurring role on one of the biggest shows” on television in her new collection of essays, Does This Make Me Funny?
While she didn’t name the program, she called it the kind of show that “makes people fall in love with TV as a medium all over again,” according to an excerpt shared with The Hollywood Reporter.
However, after filming a few episodes for one season, she had a difficult experience with the head of the program.
“The show’s creator and showrunner was an intense human. He directed some episodes every season but not all of them,” Mamet wrote. “The showrunner wasn’t always around, but when he was, the entire vibe of the set would change, as if a cold front had swept the soundstage.”
The Girls alum recalled a blocking rehearsal with the showrunner, when she was supposed to remove photos from a manila envelope and put them on a table. However, when she walked onto set, the showrunner yelled “cut” immediately.
“He gets up out of his chair at the monitors and walks toward me slowly, looking at the ground the entire time like he’s trying to figure out how to word what he’s about to say,” she continued. “And when he finally stops right in front of me, he takes a few more beats before he lifts his head, looks at me, and says, ‘What the f***are you doing?’ To which I say, ‘Um…rehearsing?’”
The showrunner allegedly grabbed Mamet’s hand with the envelope and asked her “what the f***” she was doing with it, before telling her to redo the scene.
According to Mamet, she acted out the scene multiple times, and every time she got to the part where she took the photos out of the envelope, the showrunner would call “cut” and “get up and yell.”
“Well, first, he starts off just raising his voice, which escalates to yelling, which eventually mutates into full‑out screaming,” she added. “He spews the kitchen sink at me: ‘You’re doing it wrong!’ ‘How the f*** can you think that looks right at all?’...‘I don’t understand — when I cast you, you knew how to act.’”
Mamet claimed the showrunner acted like this “for about a half hour,” before he “gave up or got bored.” However, everyone else on the set just “stared at their shoes while he screamed” at her.
“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,” she wrote.
While Mamet didn’t name the show or the showrunner in question, fans on X immediately speculated that the experience was about Mad Men and Matthew Weiner.
The Independent has contacted Weiner for comment.
Mamet played Joyce Ramsay in seasons four and five of Mad Men, joining the show when it was already an Emmy-winning series. The show, set in the 1960s, explores the intertwined professional and personal lives of advertising executive Don Draper (portrayed by Jon Hamm) and his colleagues at the Sterling Cooper ad agency.
There’s also a scene in the fourth episode of season five when Mamet’s character delivers a manila envelope to Peggy Olson (portrayed by Elizabeth Moss), who’s an employee at Sterling Cooper.
