I’m interested in recapturing how regular, nice people did things like this. It’s so unpleasant it was the state song of Kentucky until 1986. I work with a lot of African Americans, and I knew they would have to sit through this, which is basically like working on a Holocaust movie, especially hearing him sing that song over and over. Weiner: I can say that I knew that would be uncomfortable. I thought to myself, “We should have shot the crowd first.” They knew it was coming, but seeing it - it was grotesque. I stepped up on the stage and they turned the camera on, and I started singing, and I looked out into the sea of people, and everyone had their mouths hanging open. Jennifer Getsinger was directing it, and I said, “At least let’s make sure everything’s set up so that I don’t have to show up on set in blackface and just hang around for an hour.” It’s so awful, but it so accurately depicted the period, and the logical guy to have done it would have been Roger. We would have a party at the beginning of each season to welcome everyone back to town and kick off the season, and Matt had been writing for a couple months at that point, and he said, “I’ve got to tell you something: You’re going to sing ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ in blackface at a country club on Derby day,” and I was like, “Great.” It wasn’t until I was driving home that it hit me, and I thought, “Wait, what? This is crazy.” Season 3, Episode 3, “My Old Kentucky Home” Honestly, there’s a philosophical aspect behind that scene in particular, which is that I didn’t want it to feel exploitive … to make it clear this is about powerlessness and humiliation and, for Joan, this incredible disillusionment about her relationship. I thought making it happen in real time would make it the most uncomfortable, and what I consider to be nightmarish, which is the old thing of the familiar turning into the unfamiliar. What I really wanted was to see it from her point of view, and getting a shot like the dust bunnies under the couch from her point of view would be in there, which was something that we usually didn’t have time for. That story in particular, I’d heard a lot of. I don’t know if they want to see them in the show or they just have to tell somebody. Weiner: That was a euphemism from the period. Matt said a lot of people, when they described the situation that happened to them, would call it a “bad date.” But I think it was really smart how Matt portrayed it, because of that conversation, because of how controversial rape is and the way people talk about it, and the blame game that is still happening when people tell these stories. The biggest shock came after it aired, that people said, ‘Remember when Joan sort of got raped?’ And my heart just started beating faster and my hands clenched up because, to me, it’s so absurd. I was very pleased with how it turned out. So we rehearsed it a little bit and we shot it. As an actress, it was just how do you emotionally get from Point A to Point B. I took that information and I knew how the scene started and ended. In the script, it says you see Joan’s face turned to the side with a sort of disassociated stare on her face. So the day before, we did literally choreograph the moves, the move down to the floor and all that. Matt had a very distinct idea of how it should look and what it should be. But for this in particular, they wanted to do some choreography for it, so that everyone was on the same page, there were no surprises. Most of the time for every episode, we do a table read, and then we rehearse right before we shoot it. When Joan’s new husband raped her in the office, that was pretty shocking to read and do, and I think to watch. Season 2, Episode 12, “The Mountain King”
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