She’s no slouch when it comes to costume drama, but in The Buccaneers, Christina Hendricks is embracing every corseted moment. As season two prepares to hit screens, she speaks to The Weekly about what’s ahead for her character Patricia “Patti” St. George, the arrival of Leighton Meester and the longstanding love she still has for the show that broke her into the stratosphere. Read on…
How long did you have off between seasons?
I want to say it was a year and a half. It was a considerable amount of time. And it is funny because we pick up (in season two) exactly where we left off. All the continuity photos were coming out to make sure every hair was exactly as it was.
I’m like, have I aged that much in a year and a half? Do I look like the Patti at the end of season one? Our wonderful costumes and hair, and make-up and everyone made everything so precise and exact.
Did you find it hard to get back into character?
Funnily enough, you jump into that costume, and you go back and stand in the same place, and you start to remember exactly how you felt when you were standing in that moment before. Oddly, you sort of pick it right back up again.
Leighton Meester joins the cast as mysterious new character Nell. Had you worked with her before?
I’d never met Leighton before, but I was a big fan. We just adored her, we all embraced her with open arms, and she came in excited. She had watched the whole of season one before she arrived and was very invested in the storylines and the characters.
When we left off in season one, Patti decided to divorce her husband. It was almost unheard of in the 1870s – not that it’s any easier to do in modern times. What is ahead?
That’s going to be a major storyline for Patti. Like you said, it’s quite a radical decision to have asked for a divorce, especially from a very powerful, prominent man with a lot of eyes on him – a very public situation. I think [our writers] have done a really good job of taking a modern take on a courtroom drama that we might recognise or feel familiar with, but obviously with the mirror of it being the late 1800s. What that looks like for a woman then, and what it can still look like for a woman.
It’s important to show the fight that women would have to go through. It’s a fight that women still go through, but a couple of hundred years later, we have a different outcome. It probably would’ve been then, but it’s still a struggle and still hard and still embarrassing in some ways.
Patti comes in with this sense of false bravado. Like, “I’m going to come in and represent women.” The audience might think, Oh, this is going to be this really empowering female moment, and then it gets really dark and really scary and really embarrassing very quickly.
It’s good storytelling to take us on that little bit of a rollercoaster that it’s just not going to be as easy as, as maybe she thinks it’s going to be.
There were such strict rules at that time. It must have been like getting cancelled for Patti before the term “cancel culture” was coined. Do you relate to that?
Scandalous! I, I feel like I wake up every day and and ask who’s cancelled today? It can make your head spin. I’m sure there are a lot of people shaking in their boots and waiting for their turn out there.
Speaking of cancel culture… You were dropped by your own agent for taking on the role of Joan in Mad Men against their advice. What a great job you did! Do you see your career in a “before Joan” and “after Joan” kind of way?
Oh certainly. BJ – Do we want to say BJ? [Laughs] Okay, before Joan, it was much more of a struggle. I really had to go out there and just hope that I could get someone to pay attention to me while I was in the room auditioning. Half the time, they were eating their lunch and looking at the headshot of who was going to come in after me.
After Joan, people treated me with a little bit more respect. They gave me my time in the room and allowed me to come in and do my thing. It really shifted and I getting a lot more interesting scripts and interesting roles.
I’m so grateful for her. I’m so grateful for Mad Men. It changed my entire career. It changed my entire life. It holds such a huge place in my heart. It was an extraordinary experience for me and I love Joan, and I miss Joan.
At its heart, The Buccaneers is about young women trying to find their place in the world while navigating these very newly adult situations. Does it take you back to when you were that age yourself?
Back when I was becoming a Duchess? [Laughs]. I mean, obviously these circumstances are very fantastical. To have been raised in a certain way and to be taught etiquette and taught how to be a perfect young woman so that I could go and snag myself a titled man in England? It’s so far-fetched from my life.
But I understand mothers and daughters, and I understand friendships, and I understand falling in love, and I understand heartbreak. And I think that’s the reason people really enjoy the show, is that those things are all very relatable. And the friendship group of these young women is very aspirational, and then sometimes very realistic. You’re going to find that the really strong friendship that we saw in season one is going to be tested this season and broken apart in a way. And it’s going to have to rebuild itself.
Broken friendships can break your heart more than failed relationships, I feel.
I think Nan (played by Kristine Frøseth) says something like, “The real love story is us as friends.” My own friend group is so important to me; they are my family.
They are my sisters, and I rely on them so heavily. I hope other people have that support system out there and those friendships, too, because it’s really unique and really special. Those people play such an important part in your life.
The Buccaneers season two premieres Wednesday, 18 June on Apple TV+ followed by one new episode every Wednesday through 6 August, 2025. While you wait, stream The Buccaneers season one on Apple TV+ with a seven-day free trial. Subscribe here.
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