I Shake Like A Toothache

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After seeing the ultraviolent prison saga Bronson, she decided she had to work with its director, the Danish provocateur Nicolas Windig Refn. “Whatever that guy does, I knew I wanted to work with him, and then Drive came up,” she says, referring to his pulsating, neo-noir thriller about a stunt driver who moonlights as a getaway driver. Hendricks had her eye on the role of a deceitful rogue named Blanche, opposite Ryan Gosling, and while the gritty part was a detour from the glamour audiences have come to expect from her, Hendricks approached Refn anyway, asking to meet. He revealed he’d been interviewing strippers for the role and, to his surprise, discovered none of them could act. (“That’s because they’re not actresses, they’re strippers,” she told him, sagely.) Drive became a cult smash, and audiences were shocked by Blanche’s gruesome fate. (Spoiler alert: A shotgun blows Hendricks’ head to fleshy smithereens.) “I wasn’t making a point of doing the opposite of Mad Men,” she says. “I just wanted to work with this guy, but now he’s a fan of the show.” Such a fan that Refn publicly vowed to bring the DC Comics character Wonder Woman to the screen, with Hendricks wielding the Amazonian goddess’ golden lasso.

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