My intuition, just watching the show, was that Matt and you and the rest of the cast and the writers were enjoying Miss Blankenship, she was stealing her scenes, and she maybe she got a larger role as the episodes went on. Is that your sense?

I think so. I don’t think they realized how much fun Miss Blankenship was going to be. And so we inspired each other, maybe, as time went on. Miss Blankenship, the muse.

When did you find out she was going to die? Was it when you got the script or did someone give you a heads up before that?

I had no idea until the very, very end. During the fifth episode before, I found out she was going to die in the next one. I didn’t know the arc of her or if there was any catharsis. It was just kind of, Hey guess what? You’re going to kick, but it’s going to be great.

I always wonder how they break that news to an actor, when her or his character is going to be killed off.

Well, the way Matt posed it when he called me--because he always calls everybody before the death sentence, you know, the termination--he said it was preordained, they knew from the beginning. And it was a little surprising but yet not because when I first got the first side and I read it, I said, Hmmm they’re going to kill her off pretty soon. This is not going to be one of the long-lasting characters. Because you can only go so far with somebody like that in that environment. She’s not a sexual tool any more, she’s not in that game any more, and she’s not playing the rising-to-success game, so she’s off the charts in so many ways. Sometimes I thought she was kind of like the character who holds the mirror up to the main characters so that they can reflect off of what they’re going through.

I thought so too, especially in the most recent episode, where she dies. It’s almost like she was there as a warning for Joan and Peggy and Dr. Faye.

Like a foreshadowing. Like if you keep this up, guess what? You’ll go the same way I did.

Monday morning after the show aired--and I’m sure this was true in offices all over the country--when I came to work everybody was saying, “I can’t believe it. Poor Miss Blankenship! They killed her off. No, nooo!!”

I know. I had so much fun the next day because I was reading all the Tweets and the Facebook, and it was so great to see everybody’s take on it and the way they mourned the passing of Miss Blankenship. Like the Blankenship has sailed. Just these funny, funny things that people were saying that I just got such a kick out of. Like maybe we could resurrect her, and maybe she has a twin, and we gotta bring her back!

If only it was General Hospital, where they could do that. But probably not Mad Men so much.

Right. She could come back as a ghost. Or, she really wasn’t dead after all. The coroner made a mistake. It was so great to be embraced like that, and to have made such an impact was so surprising to me because it’s not like I had that much to do and I was only on for six episodes. But there’s a nerve that was hit and I’m sure it’s because she was such a contrast to what was going on. It was such a very somber kind of year on Mad Men, so maybe it was just a relief like, Oh, I can laugh here. And it was funny to me because I was reading some of the condolences and the mourning, little notes where people would say, I felt bad but I laughed when she died. As if it was that a bad thing to do.