As if being a woman during the 60s wasn’t hard enough already, Alison Brie admits her Mad Men costume was so complicated it caused a “pee incident.” The now well-established star of Community, GLOW, and BoJack Horseman got her start playing Pete Campbell’s wife Trudy on the AMC period drama about the dawn of the advertising industry’s golden age.
Matthew Weiner’s atmospheric examination of midcentury corporate culture hones in on the Sterling Cooper ad agency, where Don Draper (Jon Hamm) has made a (fake) name for himself with his inspired ideas ad campaigns. The show isn’t necessarily concerned with unpacking the sexism of its time, and virtually all of its female characters grapple with particular challenges faced by women at home and in the workplace. Trudy seems to represent the ironically underappreciated perfect housewife who, despite doing everything expected of her, still fails to win her own husband’s approval. While Trudy is supportive and agreeable, Pete is initially inattentive and unfaithful before eventually recognizing his good fortune. Her character may have deserved better, but Brie at least got to wear a fashion show’s worth of fabulous 60s-era outfits as Trudy.
On Justin Long’s podcast Life is Short, Brie admits that one of those outfits had an unfortunate side effect, ET Canada reports. The costume in question involved an especially tricky girdle, an elaborate style of undergarment that was marketed to women at the time. Brie didn’t know that “you weren’t really supposed to wear underwear under them, because they are underwear” and made a grave miscalculation:
On ‘Mad Men’ once there was a peeing incident… because we wore girdles, which you probably don’t understand what a girdle is, but it’s basically like biker shorts that go all the way up to our ribs, and it’s like time-period appropriate. There’s a small hole in them for everything to come out. So I didn’t know, for the first season of Mad Men, that you weren’t really supposed to wear underwear under them, because they are underwear. So I was rushing to set and I had to go to the bathroom. Mad Men was my first real job so I didn’t ever want to be the problem person. So I rushed to the bathroom, tried to pull the hole open, but I didn’t pull my underwear to the side so I’m peeing and not hearing it hit the bowl and then I just feel warmth. I went straight back to set. I just dabbed it with a bunch of toilet paper, because they’re waiting on me, I don’t want to be t hat person or lose my job. So I go and do several takes.
Brie says that after the scene was completed, she had to confess what happened to the costume designer. Thankfully, it wasn’t anything the costume designer hadn’t dealt with before, telling Brie “it wouldn’t be the first time” before hurrying off to bring the actress a new girdle.
Brie is a talented comedic actor and has a great sense of humor about the situation now, but it sounds like a pretty stressful experience. Luckily, her bosses weren’t bladderless monsters who would fire an employee for going to the bathroom. It’s no surprise that Brie was able to get right back into character amid a crisis, but it’s an impressive feat nonetheless. Fans would probably love to know which scene she soldiered through, both as trivia and as an acting lesson—perhaps a cross-examination of Trudy’s costumes on Mad Men would provide some insight.
Source: ET Canada
Originally from https://screenrant.com/mad-men-alison-brie-pee-girdle-costume-trudy/