Not much in the ay of appearances, but January is still making the rounds promoting the newest season of “Mad Men”. She gave another fantastic interview, this time to Collider. Some highlights below, click here to read the full article. You can also listen to the full interview here.

On Betty connecting with children, but not her own: Yeah, I definitely think that’s why she connected with children, specifically with the Glen character, and I think that’s why she also butts heads with her own children. Especially Sally and Bobby, too. I think she’s a bit easier on the baby, cause he’s a baby but…. Yeah, I think very much so. She is on the same emotional level, and I think now Sally is even surpassing her emotional maturity in a way, and has become almost Betty’s parent. Sort of weird, but.

On the fat suit and Betty’s transformation: It was extremely challenging just physically and time wise because I had 6 or 7 hours of prosthetics, so I’d have to arrive at work at 3 in the morning and then an hour to take it off at the end of the day. And I was nursing a baby. It was just very physically challenging and it was also physically limiting in what I could do on screen. The DPs and lighting everyone was very frustrated with the whole situation. I could only turn my head so much, and if I turned my body and not my head… I didn’t want to look robotic, so it was a whole new set of skills I had to learn acting wise. I felt like it was a lesson in showing emotion without moving your body or head. So it was challenging and still is. But I loved how I felt in it, too, because I just felt that it leant so much to Betty and made her a bit more sympathetic. People empathize with her a bit more, I think.

On wardrobe envy: Well, yeah, I never missed my girdle so much, as much as I complained about it. But, no, I love what Janey does for every character. The outfits that Christina [Hendricks] gets to wear and Jessica Paré’s outfits are awesome – she’s a bit more mod and that’s something that Betty would never get to do, because she’s sort of stuck in 1955. But, I don’t go crying about it or anything.

On memorizing scripts: I mean I think all of us have exercised our brains in a way where we can… I can pretty much look at my sides in the morning and have it down. Cause we don’t get rehearsal either. Unless, I have some sort of big monologue or something specific, like the Italian, or something to learn. All of us sort of just wing it. But, you get really good; I mean I’ve gotten really great at memorizing just very quickly. But we don’t have time to break it down or think ‘What I’m gonna to do.’ It’s sort of instinct on the day.

On Betty’s style: We sort of… we’ll do things in the hair and makeup trailer, without permission sometimes, where we’ll do something a little more current with hair and makeup. Cause I do think Betty is very fashionable, I think she looks at her Vogues and I think that she would try to evolve a little bit. But I just don’t think that she is at an age where she’s going to do little miniskirts and stuff. Especially not at her size at this moment.

On Betty and Don reconnecting: I liked the idea of that relationship. And I loved working with Jon and acting out those sometimes very heated arguments or passionate moments. We work really well together, and so I liked that. But, I just don’t think that it’s realistic, and Matthew doesn’t think that it’s realistic. I think that she would have been able to deal with infidelity and things like that, but finding out that he was someone else just ended it for her in her head.

On Jessica Pare: I’ve had a few scenes with Jessica which have been really fun. She’s fun.

Matthew Weiner gave a fantastic interiew to the Denver Westword regarding January and the character of Betty. Some highlights below and you can read the full article here.

By Mad Men’s fifth season, Betty Draper had walked out of our lives, and a much plumper Betty Francis had waddled in. The audience response to this swollen version of a once-slender character: a collective cringe. Suddenly Betty became a joke. In no time, a parody of Ram Jam’s “Black Betty” hit the Internet, spoofing the ice cream–guzzling former beauty queen as “Fat Betty.”

“I think people were shocked she was still on the show,” Mad Men creator and executive producer Matthew Weiner concurred in a recent sit-down at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. “I never want to do the show without January,” Weiner says plainly. “She’s such an interesting actress, quite honestly, and she originally signed on for three lines.”

Betty appeared only at the very end of Mad Men’s pilot, and she was purposely left out of the season-one promotional campaign. Weiner wanted the very existence of the fool-around ad man’s stunning wife to be a surprise.

Betty is part of a “wasted generation,” he says. “She’s educated, and she has the best job in the world, which is living in the lap of luxury with all these conveniences, and not having that much housework to do.
“It’s hard on her,” he adds. Hard on her mostly because Betty is, as Weiner says, “caught in between.” She earned a degree from Bryn Mawr at a time just before society might ask her to use it. For Betty, beauty was always her most logical path to success.