For Kiernan Shipka’s Next Trick, She’ll Make Sabrina Disappear
Her childhood was spent on Mad Men and her adolescence as lead of Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina. Now, a new era of Kiernan Shipka is dawning.

“I’m 20, so now I’m feeling old,” Kiernan Shipka says to a chorus of laughter during a press visit to the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Vancouver set in January. She knows what that sentence sounds like. She knows you’re probably rolling your eyes right now. She knows she’s not really old. But as she’s gone from being a 7-year-old alongside Jon Hamm and January Jones on Mad Men practically straight to leading the cast of cult Netflix drama The Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina, she can’t help but feel like a lot of life has already passed her by.

“When I started [filming CAOS] I was 18, and I was like, I’m supposed to be a freshman in college trying to figure out what to do with my life, and instead I’m doing this — and there’s nothing I’d rather do,” she quickly clarifies.

In the show’s third season, which was released on January 24, Sabrina Spellman has gone from being a reluctant half-witch to embracing who she is in all of her devil-worshipping, hell-traveling glory. Shipka’s own increasing self-confidence on set mirrors her character’s story — minus, you know, the regular visits to hell.

“Watching Kiernan come up as she has done since that first season has been absolutely thrilling,” CAOS co-star Michelle Gomez, who plays teacher Mary Wardwell, says during the visit. “And that girl is a phenomenal human being.”

“Not only is she masterful at everything she takes on, she also really knows how to drive a scene, which is something not all people know how to do,” Miranda Otto, who plays Sabrina’s Aunt Zelda, adds. “She keeps the energy of everything going. She really is a powerhouse.”

While Kiernan’s official role is that of Sabrina, her two years on set have resulted in her wearing a number of hats. For instance, she’s also the person responsible for throwing parties and get-togethers for the tight-knit cast, who can often be seen out and about together on the streets of Vancouver.

“We have game nights,” she tells Refinery29 on a later phone call from Vancouver. “We play running charades. And there’s a karaoke place here.”

Read more at the source

Today is Kiernan’s 20th birthday! I wanted to wish Kiernan a very happy birthday. I hope you have an amazing day celebrating with friends and family. To celebrate at I Heart Kiernan, I have added a few exclusive outtakes from her photoshoot in 2017 for InStyle. Enjoy!

Kiernan is featured on the digital cover of Glamour UK. I have added the cover and outtakes to the gallery! I love this photoshoot.

GLAMOUR MAGAZINE – “It’s 8am and I am wearing a novelty onsie. When you start loving yourself, life gets a lot more fun,” Kiernan Shipka tells me. This could be the life of any 19-year-old on the way to – or skiving from – university, but Kiernan is not like any other late teen you’ve ever met. She did, after all, make her TV debut at five months old in ER, before outshining her adult cast mates as Sally Draper in Mad Men, from the age of seven.

The star of The Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina has called me while travelling to set for season two, where she’s been putting in 13-hour-days, up to six times a week for almost a year. Kiernan is in a reflective mood, talking about the realities of growing up in the public eye.

Kiernan continues, “By the end of Mad Men, I had been on the show for a longer period of my life than I hadn’t. When that wrapped, I was trying to figure out who I was in a lot of ways without the show… Growing up and being in the industry while trying my best to maintain a very normal life outside of it – which I’m lucky that I did. I definitely think my ‘growing up’ was in so many ways so unconventional. I didn’t go to a traditional school, I didn’t have a traditional route. I knew what I wanted to do really early on. I was lucky that I was in an environment that embraced growing up and let me figure out who I was. But there were moments when it was super hard, for sure. I was trying to figure out: what exactly does it all mean?”

On hand to help Kiernan find out, were Mad Men’s cast of formidable, fierce feminists including January Jones, who she remains close with. “I’m lucky that I grew up on a show that really championed women and portrayed them as multidimensional characters,” she reflects. “I wasn’t seeing one-dimensional female stereotypes being portrayed around me. I was seeing women who were going through a lot, being portrayed with so much depth, emotion, flaws, insecurities, power and strength. So, I feel like I grew up in a bubble that was very feminist by nature. It wasn’t until I started getting a little bit older, that I started looking around and realising that’s not the case everywhere. That’s the thing with , it actually highlighted the inequality that women were facing and still are facing today, in so many ways.”

But the internet provided Kiernan with a rather rude awakening to gender inequality. “Once I started using the internet in general, I started to see that a little bit more. I remember being in a course at school and they were highlighting the feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s. That was when I was like, ‘Oh, women have been fighting for a long time!’”

Read the rest of the interview at the source

Kiernan has a new beautiful photoshoot for L’Officiel Paris! Check out the outtakes in our gallery and read her interview below. I’ll add scans soon!

LOFFICIEL – Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men, recently considered following up on his masterpiece by saying, “The only reason is to see what happened to Sally Draper. That I owe to Kiernan, she is the heart of this series.” By playing Sally, the impertinent daughter of advertising executive Don Draper, Kiernan Shipka, from 2007 to 2015, she was indeed made unforgettable. Her secret: to play this privileged little girl like a rebel, while showing that she remains a pure product of her conservative environment. Mad Men was also an opportunity for the actress to assert her style. Thanks to Sally Draper’s wardrobe, her performer, of Irish-Slovak origin, born in Chicago to parents totally foreign to the world of cinema and fashion, made the girls in Hollywood jealous, without having time to take the big head. Matt Weiner extended the scenes in which she appeared, and Kiernan built a golden reputation that allowed him to last in Hollywood, and to be today the star of Sabrina’s New Adventures. Second TV adaptation, this time quite dark, sometimes horrific, of an ultra-popular comic book, after the very kitsch one of the 1990s, this Netflix version is a modern rereading of Sabrina’s character, who must choose between two incompatible worlds: that of mortals and that of witches. Magic tricks, witty words about intersectional feminism, even Satan’s patriarchal authoritarianism… Kiernan dazzles Sabrina’s fans. “Sometimes you need an icon to play another icon,” says Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, the showrunner of the series.

You play Sabrina, half witch, half human. Is it easy?

Kiernan Shipka: The real challenge is fourteen hours of shooting every day: laughing at one take, fighting a demon in the next, then sprinting, bursting into tears and solving a mystery by reciting two pages of Latin. Not to mention giving the answer to Salem, the black cat to whom I am allergic. In those moments, I could really use Sabrina’s superpowers.

Do you feel vulnerable?

I have been living in the film business for a long time. As I grew up, I fortunately managed to consider it as a profession. This hindsight allowed me to ask myself, “Do I want to make this my life?” It reveals the need to organize my existence. Besides, I love making project lists!

What was the best advice you received?

Finding the balance between fun and professionalism!

Sally Draper’s personality has it rubbed off on you?

The time of the show, yes, I was fashion addict like her. Then I had a period of withdrawal where I managed to cultivate my fascination for fashion while finding my own style of clothing.

And Sabrina, doesn’t she also take up a lot of space in your life?

His fan club is such that I have become the object of immense attention. But I keep in mind that Sabrina is a great source of inspiration for kids: shared between two worlds, she finally sets her own path, and I hope she will encourage her fans to be themselves.

So spending your life in the public eye has an advantage?

For a long time I was the only child on the set, but I never felt in danger. It’s invaluable, especially since at my age, the experiences are always new. But those around me make sure that I keep my head on my shoulders.

Is your collaboration with Fendi one of them?

The wide variety of their clothes touches me: with Fendi, I can be seductive, fun, fashionable or edgy. As for the glasses, I can’t do without them anymore.

You are active on social networks, yet your media rise has protected you from smear campaigns.

How can this miracle be explained?

If you dig in the depths of the internet, you will find pictures of me at 7 and 19 years old, so I never google myself. I only manage my Instagram account and I touch wood to protect it from trolls. I would prefer Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola to notice it, because I dream of touring with them.

Kiernan has done a new photoshoot for The Telegraph! You can check out beautiful outtakes in the gallery and read her interview below.

TELEGRAPH – Child stars tend to all grow up in the same way: early success, flailing box-office figures through puberty, parental emancipation, a very public skidding off the rails, a couple of stints in rehab, bankruptcy and finally, self-imposed isolation.

Kiernan Shipka shows no sign of following that pattern. At 19, she is just old enough to vote (and she intends to: “I try to be woke”), but too young to buy alcohol in America – not that the legal drinking age, or the illegality of drugs, has stopped many child stars from developing habits, I remind her. “I was doing really normal kid things so I guess that never even really felt available. I mean, I’m sure it was available if I’d really sought it out, but I didn’t.”

Depending on your age, you’ll recognise Shipka for one of two roles. To the over 30s, she’s Sally, the eldest child of Don and Betty Draper on the long-running series Mad Men, Matthew Weiner’s drama set in the advertising industry in 1960s New York.

To the under 30s, she’s Sabrina Spellman, the half-witch, half-mortal protagonist of Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, based on the Archie Comics character. It’s produced by the team behind Riverdale, Netflix’s incredibly popular modern take on the Betty and Veronica, Archie and Jughead comics.

Dressed in velvet trousers and a matching crop top, her blonde bob slicked back, Shipka looks, if anything, younger than her years, seeming precocious as she gushes “thank-you-so-much” at speed to everyone on set. It’s the morning after Fendi’s autumn/winter 2019 menswear show in Milan, and Shipka fizzes over the clothes, the city…

She’s at ease in the fashion-shoot setting, used to working with stylists both on television sets and for red carpet appearances, where her style has evolved from child-appropriate babydoll and prom dresses to embellished mini-dresses and statement trouser suits of late.

Her accent is broad LA: she projects her voice, and smiles constantly. (If anyone at home is having problems with surly teens, media training might provide the answer.) Despite her youth, Shipka is focused, at ease, eloquent. There’s no agent in the room with us to deflect unwelcome questions; neither is there any trace of nervousness – but then, she’s not new to this.
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Kiernan is featured on the December cover of Seventeen! This shoot is SUPER cute and one of my favorites Kiernan has done. Check out the cover and some outtakes released so far to the gallery. The magazine hits newsstands on November 27, and we will add scans as soon as we get the issue. Enjoy!

SEVENTEEN – Kiernan Shipka has been working as an actress for pretty much her entire life, but for years, the former Mad Men star was probably more on your parents’ radar than on yours. “I may as well have been a fly on the wall at the Kids’ Choice Awards,” she tells Seventeen in an interview. Now, with the 19-year-old playing iconic teen witch Sabrina Spellman in Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, she’s finally ready to welcome a new fan base: people her own age. “Having my friends be genuinely excited to watch the show is really cool,” Kiernan says.

The creepy series has all the facets of a grown-up role (A love triangle! Challenging authority! Blood!) and a pro-female message she’s happy to get behind. “I’m unreasonably excited that young girls are going to get to have this character be an inspiration to them. I think she is so strong-willed, has such a good heart, speaks her mind, stands up for herself, and questions things that she feels aren’t right.”

Get to know Kiernan and you’ll feel the same way about her too.

ON DOING GOOD
An upside to having phones and social media has been so much more awareness of all the injustices and things going on in the world, and having a voice and platform that just didn’t exist before. It’s just really incredible to me—I feel like I can continually learn new things every single day. Recently on Instagram, I did the 10 Featured Teachers [campaign], and it was so amazing and such a beautiful experience to see all these teachers and kids getting books that they needed. It was very gratifying to see it actually have an impact in individual people’s lives and to [watch] thank-you videos from [people] who are just so, so happy to have a book that they’ve wanted…it’s just amazing. So more of that to come, for sure. I’m interested to see how we can take that hashtag and put it on a greater scale.

ON HER BIG ROLE
She’s drawn to Sabrina’s girl power.

I gravitate toward feminist content because that’s just who I am. But there was something so cool about this show being so feminist while still having this very separate fantastical element. It’s sort of set in this “timeless” period where there aren’t many references to pop culture, or what’s happening now or what happened in the past. But at the same [time], it’s related to what’s happening in many different ways and resonates on so many levels. (Read more of the interview at the source)

TEEN VOGUE – Kiernan Shipka is a professional. At 18, her résumé reads longer than those of a lot of other actors. But even working steadily for over a decade — 12 years and counting — can’t prepare you for being tagged on Instagram as someone’s Halloween costume.

“It’s a really weird, kind of surreal experience,” the actor admits of having seen fans dress as the teen witch. “But it’s so cool and I’m loving what I’m seeing.” Fittingly, the day also happens to be Sabrina’s birthday. In the new Netflix series, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, it’s also a lunar eclipse and the day Sabrina is set to sign her name away to Satan himself, join the unholy Church of Night, and renounce her life as a mortal forever. (Spoiler alert: she has second thoughts, and wants to read the fine print before literally making a deal with the devil.)

Kiernan, meanwhile, is multitasking in her own way: already filming scenes for season 2 of the show, and watching the DIY costumes roll in on Instagram. (“People are getting their cats involved!” she adds.) It’s a relatively new sensation, too; while she concedes that people may have dressed up as Sally Draper, one of the few voices of reason on Mad Men, there’s something singular about seeing Sabrina be born anew in tribute. “She’s such a fun, badass character, and she’s so right and current for this sort of time that we’re in,” Kiernan says. “I think that will resonate with a lot of people.”

Iterations of Sabrina have been in the works for years; at one point, creator Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa has said, the character could have shown up as the villain on Riverdale. But it is now a TV show, and it is dark and twisted and deals in horror, the occult, and teenage love triangles in equal measure. That it debuted in 2018, when almost everything feels horrible, might be nothing short of magic.

The character of Sabrina was born in 1962, and brought a supernatural element to the squeaky-clean hijinks of the Archie comics. It wasn’t until 2014 that her story took a turn for the gruesome, when The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina debuted as a comic book (Aguirre-Sacasa wrote that book as well.) As a result, the Sabrina Spellman of 2018 isn’t the Sabrina the Teenage Witch from the days of the TGIF sitcom lineup; they’re each an adaptation of different source material. That Sabrina crimped her hair and had a talking cat, and when she pointed her finger, a tinkling little sound would indicate that magic was at play. This Sabrina loves horror movies, must choose between a mortal education at Baxter High or a magical immersion at the Academy of Unseen Arts, and slits a frenemy’s throat. (Don’t worry: she buries her in a bewitched garden that brings people back from the dead.)

Yet underneath the show’s supernatural forces and macabre storylines lies what Kiernan believes is a kernel of truth. Sabrina, she explains, is “sort of torn between two worlds, and instead of choosing a path, she forges her own. That’s what I love about this show and that part of the story: it’s so relatable. Even though it’s about witches and has that added layer of fantasy to it, there’s a very grounded-in-reality aspect to it as well.”

Kiernan knows a thing or two about feeling torn between two things, “on smaller scales, on bigger scales,” she muses. “Whatever you choose, whatever path you take, you’re gonna learn something, you’re gonna take things away from it as long as you make them most of that experience. I don’t think that having a hard time is inherently negative. I think that it can make you a stronger person; it can be tough and painful but it can make you grow. I think that’s definitely easier said than done but I think approaching everything with a level of curiosity instead of judgment would be my main advice.”
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