Erin Cummings On The Best Advice She Ever Got, Slapping Don Draper, And What She Stole From Her Astronaut Wives Club Wardrobe

How far back should I go? When I was a young girl I did plays. I remember always loving the experience of embodying a new character, whether it was the White Witch in The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe or some other villainous character, usually. I just remember feeling very at home. I remember feeling very safe around actors and directors and creative types. It was so different from anything that anyone in my family had ever done. To me, it was a very exciting thing to explore. Obviously, when you grow up in a small town and no one that you have ever met or heard of has become an actor, it seems like an impossible task.

It wasn't until I got to college and was majoring in advertising -- journalism and advertising -- that I realized the thing I loved the most about advertising was doing the pitch, being in front of people and putting on a performance of sorts. I was having trouble grappling with the idea of working in an office for the rest of my career. On a whim, I started doing theater in Dallas. That's what led me here.

It was a very long process. When I think back to the number of people who told me "This is not going to happen," "You shouldn't do this," "This is a huge mistake," "You have no background as an actor," "You have no training as an actor," I have no idea why I stuck with it. I came out to Los Angeles and that blew a lot of misconceptions that I had about how someone becomes an actor. I met waiters and assistants and dog walkers and I would always ask them, "What do you do?" They'd say, "I'm an actor." I would say, "What does that mean, and how are you doing this and is Julia Roberts your aunt?" I realized that most people who were pursuing an acting career were not related to someone famous. I kind of thought that's what you had to have -- some sort of foot in the door, some in. What I realized was there were a lot of people that were just simply working hard and studying and putting one foot in front of the other. I thought, "I can do that. I can work hard and go to classes."

I don't really think I had a specific game plan, I just knew I needed to learn as much as I possibly could because I had to catch up with all the other actors who had started acting when they were five. I didn't start until I was twenty-three, so I had a lot of work to catch up on.

I dug my heels in. I did every student film, obviously for no money. I did every little independent film for no money, I did every play for no money. Any time that someone would give me an opportunity to be on a stage or in front of a camera, I did it. I took it -- obviously within reason! I just started really working as much as I could so that I could not just necessarily build a résumé. Certainly, doing background work and doing student films isn't going to fill out your résumé, but what it did was give me an understanding of what the business is like. I learned very quickly it's a lot of sitting around, or if you're working in film and television or if you're working in theater, it's a lot of long hours up on stage going over and over and over and over the same lines over and over again.

Those were really valuable -- I call them my character-building years because certainly I wasn't making a living as an actor, so I was doing everything plus that. I worked as an assistant, I worked as a waitress, I worked as a box model at the Standard Hotel. It's this sort of iconic, very strange job that's in Los Angeles. I did that once. I was a driver for a porn actress once. I just had these crazy stories of things you just got to do to get the bills paid while you're pursuing your dreams.

It wasn't like there was one big thing that happened. My first job in television was this: I had two lines on Star Trek Enterprise as Prostitute #1. Then I had a couple lines as Roadhouse Woman #2 on a soap opera called Passions.

Then I did an episode of Charmed, and then I did an episode of Cold Case. Then I did this really awesome movie called Bitch Slap, and that opened a lot of doors. One thing just kept leading to another. My work begat more work. Now I really find myself in a wonderful position of being able to go from one job to the next job to the next job. It's something that I'm incredibly proud of. I don't believe in luck so I certainly don't consider myself lucky, but I do consider myself fortunate that I had such a strong support system around me -- my parents, specifically -- of people who really never let me quit. I think that's really important. It would've been so easy so many times to just say, "Oh gosh, this is too hard," or "I'm never going to make it" or whatever.

I remember when I first came to Los Angeles, every successful person I met, I would say, "What's the number one thing people who are successful have?" The overwhelming response was perseverance. You stick around long enough and you work hard enough and eventually you will get what's due to you.

That's been my experience.

[laughs] Yeah.

100 percent have that mastered.

I think what really attracts me to these projects is, I grew up watching movies from the 1930s and the 1940s. Preston Sturges is one of my favorite film directors. I loved watching and fantasizing about women like Rosalind Russell and Claudette Colbert and Bette Davis -- women who really knew how to captivate and how to capture the eye when they were on screen. They could do it with just simple little things like a raised eyebrow or a quick side eye to someone. They knew how to move their bodies, they knew how to go down deep in their voice. They also knew when to raise their voice. They were able to really give a performance that was so rich and full. Every period piece says "We don't want acting, we don't want you to 'act' like you're in an old movie." Fortunately, most of the characters that I've played have always had a little bit of sass, a little bit of attitude, certainly a great deal of gravitas that lends itself to a bit of an affected performance in the way of these women not walking across the room but prowling across the room.

For me, I get to embody the women that I grew up watching and admiring. That's what really attracts me to it. As far as what attracts other people to me, I think really it comes through in the joy that I have for what I'm doing. I also have heard quite a bit that I simply have a very period look about me in my facial structure, my body. My physicality lends itself to being very period, which I certainly am happy to embrace. I don't really know why people keep casting me, but I'm glad that they do and I hope it continues.

I was sent the script in January of 2014. The head of casting at ABC said, "There's two roles that I think that you'd be right for. You read it and let me know which one you'd like to audition for." He'd cast me on Pan Am. I certainly wasn't being offered the role by any stretch of the imagination, but he kind of had an idea of who would resonate with me. From the moment I read the script, I knew it was Marge. There was no question. I fell madly in love with her.

It's funny -- I don't know what the actual saying is, but there's this idea as an actor that your role is waiting for you. No matter what anyone does, they can't take that role away from you: it's your job. I felt that way about Sura in Spartacus, I felt that way about Ginny on Pan Am, and I knew that to be true about Marge Slayton in Astronaut Wives Club. This is not to discredit any of the fantastic, brilliantly talented actresses that auditioned for that role, but to be quite honest, they never had a chance. It was the role that I was born to play.

As it got further and further along in the process of me going back for multiple auditions, I wrote Stephanie Savage, the creator of the show. I wrote her an impassioned letter expressing my interest in this role and how Marge and I were similar and what I could bring to the character. I finished it by saying, this show will be better if I am on it as Marge. Fortunately, she read that. I don't know if that was what tipped the scales. Certainly it was something where I said, "I don't want to walk away from this without doing absolutely everything in my power to make it happen." We were very excited.

There's a lot of other little very strange coincidences. A psychic that I went to see randomly happened to be best friends with someone in the hair department. Just random things of going all signs are pointing to this coming to fruition. I was very happy when it came through.

I was really most excited about the opportunity to take a woman whose life had been erased from history and pull her out of the shadows to tell her story. Even though, yeah, a great deal of our show is creative license -- I don't know how Marge actually felt about being divorced, for instance. For the sake of storytelling, we are playing it that it was a subject that brought her great shame. Let's face it, this is ABC, and that makes for great television. More so, I wanted to show the transformation that Marge goes through from when she first becomes an astronaut wife. We know she did grow up poor. She did not grow up with wealthy parents or with parents who even stayed married. She did not grow up with the same education as some of these other women, she didn't grow up with the same privileges as some of these women. For her, this was very much a fish-out-of-water situation. By the end of the entire journey, she ends up becoming the leader of the Astronaut Wives Club. That's not giving anything away -- that is the one thing that is very well documented about Marge Slayton.

She ends up this woman who comes in as the underdog and arises as the leader. I think that's a pretty powerful story. I certainly feel that sometimes, having grown up in a prison town and now being able to be someone who inspires young women in my tiny little hometown to dream big and to reach further. As much as I had big dreams when I first came here, I don't think that I really thought that this is where I would be. My biggest goal coming to Hollywood was to get into movies that my friends could rent at Blockbuster. That was pretty cool in my mind.

There's a deeper sense of honor that's associated with it. I met a woman whose father was an astronaut; her mother was an astronaut wife in one of the later missions. I asked, "Did you ever meet any of the wives, did you ever meet Marge Slayton?" She said, "I never met Marge, but my mom talked about her a lot." I said, "What did she say?" She said Marge really was the one wife who helped open the doors for the rest of them and really taught them the ropes and that she was very kind. I just started sobbing. I'm in lunch and all of a sudden it became so real to me that this is not just a character. It's a real person.

Even though Marge has passed on, I like to think that if she were alive today, she would be proud of the way that she is being portrayed. I like to think that she would enjoy seeing a sassy side to herself. I don't know if she actually had one, but I like to think she did. Yeah, it's very much an honor.

It's really interesting, because I never saw her as being modern or contemporary in any way until I started doing interviews and people started asking about how modern she was. I just never really saw her like that. Also, in the first episode, we see Marge tell Trudy that the idea of a woman going into space is ridiculous -- that a pig will fly in space before a woman does. I think that because of comments like that, and also -- there's no facts to back this up, but I don't think that Marge got a divorce because she's a modern woman. The impression that I got is that Marge got a divorce because she had no choice. That can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. I have my own interpretation of what that means that really helped me create her as a character. I never believed that her divorce was a product of her being a modern woman as much as it was a product of her need for survival.

It's interesting because as Tom and I were getting pretty serious during Astronaut Wives Club. It became pretty evident very early in the process that we were probably going to end up getting married. By January he was asking my parents for their blessing.

I think maybe subconsciously yes. My relationship with Kenneth Mitchell, who plays Deke Slayton so beautifully, was very interesting because -- this is not to discredit anyone else -- I saw Marge and Deke's relationship as being the most exciting and the most realistic of all the relationships on the show because they have these moments of intense passion. They would have these arguments but at the end of the day they knew they had each other's back. Marge was going to fight to the very end to make sure that Deke got everything that he wanted. For me, Tom and I have a very supportive relationship. We joke that we are each other's team captains: I'm the captain of Team Tom and he's the captain of Team Erin. We are very passionate about one another and passionate about one another's dreams and desires. For me, just as Marge did everything in her power, even behind Deke's back, to make sure that he had every chance that he could, if anyone were to stand in the way of Tom and his dream, I would attack them with the fierceness of a barracuda.

I would call the President and I would say, "We need to fix this situation." In some ways, yeah, I think that there was maybe a little bit of art imitating life imitating reality. Also, Kenneth Mitchell, if I could just talk about him for a moment: he is such a phenomenal actor and is so wonderful to work with in that every scene we had together, there was just such depth, such love, such support. I always felt so safe with him, but also so excited and intrigued because I never knew what was going to happen.

There's a scene that unfortunately did not make it into the final cut because, as I found out later, it wrapped up their relationship too much, exposed too much of their relationship too soon in the story. Stephanie Savage has told me that she is going to do everything to make sure it's in the deleted scenes if there's a DVD. There was a scene and the way that we read it, I didn't really have any preconceived ideas about it. I just thought, "Okay, this is very cut-and-dried. He does this, I do that, we say this."

The way that Kenneth brought so much power and emotion and pain of himself into the scene, it broke me in half as Marge. I was just crying, he was crying, the director was crying, Stephanie Savage was crying. JoAnna Garcia Swisher, she's so funny, she came over and she just had tears coming down her face. She goes, "I didn't even know what scene we were shooting. I just happened to walk on set and I feel like someone just kicked me in the stomach. That was so sad!"

That wasn't even something we planned. It was just something that organically happened. I have to say I'm so sad that the scene didn't make it. Of all the scenes in the entire season, that's the one that always stands out to me as the one that just was so powerful. I hope we get to see it one day. Kenneth Mitchell's fantastic. I would love to work with him again. I think any actress who's blessed to share the screen with Kenneth Mitchell is certainly going to give the performance of her lifetime.

You know what? I stole one item. I'll give you one guess what that item was.

No. It's my girdle. I wore that thing every day and I loved it so much. I wear it all the time. I wore it for my KTLA interview and my Inside Edition interview this morning.

Yes. I stole my girdle. I also figured, "Hey, after I've been sweating in this thing for six months, they're not going to be able to use it on anybody else. They won't miss it." Yeah. I snuck away with my girdle. They keep pretty tight tabs on that vintage wardrobe. They don't let that go too far.

It just gets more and more. Just wait. We haven't even scratched the surface. Eric Daman, our wardrobe designer, did such a brilliant job. What astounded me so much was that every single scene, even if we didn't have a line of dialogue, someone who just be a quick glimpse, especially towards the end where they start speeding through the years, fast forward what happened towards the end of the '60s, every character has her own color palette. You'll see Marge wears a lot of browns. She wears a lot of gem tones, and red, purple. Then you see Zoe Boyle, who wears a lot of cream colors, and you see JoAnna Garcia Swisher who wears a lot of orange and Yvonne Strahovski wears a lot of pink. Not only did every character have their own color palette, within each scene, each character, when all seven of us were together, created this tableau. It wasn't like if you spilled something on your dress they could just get another brown dress, it wasn't like that. The dress was specifically chosen for the way it worked with all the other six dresses. To do that, plus the shoes, plus the brooches, plus the necklaces, plus the jewelry, plus the purses and the hats and the clothes. It's just so much. We are so fortunate that we were able to have someone so unbelievably talented at the helm of that. The clothing really does help you create that character.

Yeah, there's a lot of Moon Balls that the ladies start going to.

I hope that I never get sick of talking about slapping Don Draper.

It was actually really terrifying. I was straddling Jon Hamm because I didn't want to just sit on him because obviously that could be a very uncomfortable moment. First of all, my leg: if you can imagine holding yourself in a squatting position for an excruciatingly long period of time? My legs started shaking. He finally looked at me and he said, "Are you nervous? Are you okay?" Obviously, he has had to do a lot of sex scenes on the show. I don't know if he ever got comfortable doing that. I don't know what his perception of those scenes was. Obviously, being the lead of the show, he wanted me to be more comfortable. I said, "Yeah, I'm not shaking because I'm nervous, I'm shaking because I've been sitting in a squat position for about three minutes now."

When it came time for the slap, I had Jon Hamm looking up at me saying, "Don't slap too hard." Then I had Matt Weiner in my ear saying, "Slap him as hard as you can." Maybe not "slap him as hard as you can" -- I may be paraphrasing that. But he was like, "No, you need to slap him. This is an extreme close-up. We need to see your hand make contact with his face." Jon saying, "Don't slap me for real," and Matt saying, "You need to slap him for real."

Back and forth. I finally said, "I'm sorry, Jon, but that's the guy who cuts my paycheck, so I'm going to have to slap you." He took it like a champ.

He was very much a man about it, yes. That was a great experience. He was really just very professional and kind and supportive. Really a wonderful experience. I was, like so many other people, such a huge fan of that show. I had my audition and I had read that the character was going to slap someone named Steve. I was like, "Steve? Gee, I wonder who Steve is? Who's this new character Steve?" I get cast in the role, and then I go to the table read, where you have to check your script out and then turn it back in at the end. I flipped to my page and I see Candace, and she's slapping Don. I was like, "Don. Don? Oh my-- DON. Oh my God." I literally realized at the table read that I was going to be doing this with Don Draper, not some random guy named Steve that was in the original sides. That was kind of a big moment.

First of all, thanks for letting me know that. I knew I shot it but I didn't know when it was airing. That's fantastic. Oh my gosh. I'm spending the Fourth of July with Tom's family in Cape Cod so we'll get to watch that. Tomorrow night's Astronaut Wives and Sunday night's Halt And Catch Fire! Halt And Catch Fire's another one where I read the pilot for the script and I wanted that show so bad. I just thought it was so brilliantly written. It was such a strong show, such a smartly written show. Lee Pace is fantastic. I loved him in Pushing Daisies. To see him in this show, he really does transform. My work is with Scoot McNairy. I play a woman from his past that he reunites with -- somebody he went to high school with, a buddy. They reunite. I won't really go into too much detail because I don't know what I'm allowed to say and what I'm not. That was a really great experience. It was certainly a lesson in how high-waisted jeans are not flattering and maybe not something that i should incorporate into my 2015 wardrobe.

It was very interesting to play another decade. I'm so used to playing '60s, so to do something in the '80s was really fun for me. The director, Larysa Kondracki, was so phenomenal. When we did the scenes, it all takes place over one day. It was a scene earlier in the day, a scene just at dusk, and there's a scene late at night. It's all one location, just on this truck out by a lake. It really was like shooting a little short film. We all acknowledged that and so we kind of felt like we were a bunch of creative people just getting together shooting a little short film again that had a beginning, a middle, and end. It wasn't forced, it wasn't rushed. It's one of the things I really value at working cable is that because you're not rushing towards a commercial break, you're allowed to let a scene breathe. You're allowed to take those really beautiful pauses that happen in life. People are not rushing towards the commercial break in life. People pause when they talk. That's just how people speak. I am very excited to see that episode. I was so thrilled to be a part of it.

Working with Scoot McNairy is great. He's just so talented.

My favorite show is Orange Is The New Black. I love it. I actually met the actress at my KTLA interview this morning who plays Taystee. I had to just gush like a creepy stalker fangirl about how in love with the show I am. I love Orange Is The New Black because I think the storylines are fascinating. I think the show is absolutely hysterical but also has such a heart. I really enjoy and appreciate shows that are able to effectively showcase the diversity that we live with in the world. In the world, we have black people and white people and Asian people and Hispanic people and old people and young people and short people and fat people and thin people. We have all sorts of people. I turn on the television and I don't always see that. Certainly that's a concern that I had going into The Astronaut Wives Club just because I was like, "Wow, it's a show about seven white women and their seven white husbands." I certainly love watching the shows that actually reflect the world that I live in which is a very colorful world.

I also really appreciate shows that have predominately female cast members. It is frustrating for me when I hear people say it's a woman show. You see a show that has a predominately male cast -- even Mad Men. Women love Mad Men, but you didn't hear them going, "It's a guy show." It was very much male-oriented and male-driven but nobody ever questioned whether or not women should tune into it. I love shows that feature women's storylines that are not necessarily just about a bunch of old hens sitting around talking about men. We have other things to talk about besides who broke our heart last weekend. So I'm a big fan of Orange Is The New Black. I'd love to be on it. Would love to be on it. Feel free to put that out in the universe.

Oh! Well then, yeah. I will call him right now.

Dude. Who do I need to pay? Don't pay me to be on it, I'll pay you to let me on it. I'll do it.

I would love to be able to say that it was My So-Called Life, because that show's so great when it comes to capturing the angst of youth. But I have to be honest and admit that I didn't actually start watching it until later in life and I got to be nostalgic about the angst of youth.

But...yeah. I think the show that resonates the most when I think about the shows that I grew up watching was probably Growing Pains.

I learned a lot from Mike Seaver. He, too, wanted to be an actor if memory serves correct. I also looked back later and thought, "Wow, they actually could call a character Boner on network television and no one had a problem with that." I can't even smoke a cigarette on Astronaut Wives Club! Yeah, I think Growing Pains is probably the one that sticks out the most.