After inspiring a heap of headlines about a former verbally abusive boss who led her to quit one of the biggest shows on television, Zosia Mamet touched briefly on her past experience with Matthew Weiner during a conversation at 92NY on Thursday.
Earlier this week, in an exclusive excerpt from her new collection of essays Does This Make Me Funny?, Mamet opened up about being screamed at by a major showrunner in the early days of her career; she left set that day and told her agents she was quitting the show, despite being scheduled for more episodes. The actress doesn’t name the show or the showrunner in her book, but the internet was quick to claim that it was Weiner on the set of Mad Men, as Mamet appears in seasons four and five.
In a chat with former Girls costar Andrew Rannells, Weiner’s name came up as the two discussed how improv-friendly their show had been compared to other projects. Rannells commented, “We both worked with Matt Weiner, who was like strict, very strict about language.” Mamet responded, “Very strict,” before quickly moving on to comparisons about working on network TV shows like Parenthood.
Elsewhere in the conversation, Mamet explained how she chose what stories to include in the book, noting, “I think for the most part, a lot of these stories were really — even if they’re funny at times — pretty traumatic. I think that they were things that had happened that sort of went away into a box in my head and were never touched again, so they were almost like fossilized. And so I think when I went through the Rolodex of memories in my brain, they were the ones that were the most fully formed and they seemed like the easiest to write about.”
Mamet also commented that she wasn’t trying to “write a shocker” and “I really didn’t think about the fact that [the essays] were that revealing until I had to do the audiobook.” When she had to read her words aloud for the first time, “I was like, ‘Who let me publish this?’” she joked, noting that no one besides her editor and her manager had read it before it went to print.
The actress teased, “I literally didn’t process the fact that this book was coming out until like Sunday night.”