'Mad Men' Star Elisabeth Moss Has Done No Research To Play Peggy Olson

Elisabeth Moss' 'Mad Men' Admission
BEVERLY HILLS, CA- JUNE 12: Actress Elisabeth Moss attends Women In Film's 2013 Crystal + Lucy Awards at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on June 12, 2013 in Beverly Hills, California.(Photo by Jeffrey Mayer/WireImage)
BEVERLY HILLS, CA- JUNE 12: Actress Elisabeth Moss attends Women In Film's 2013 Crystal + Lucy Awards at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on June 12, 2013 in Beverly Hills, California.(Photo by Jeffrey Mayer/WireImage)

Elisabeth Moss has been playing Peggy Olson on "Mad Men" for nearly a decade and despite the immense precision with which the AMC drama tells its '60s-set stories, she has a confession to make.

When asked on NPR's "Fresh Air" if she studied old ads from the '60s to get a feel for the environment at the time, Moss said, "No, not at all. I’ve done absolutely no research involving 'Mad Men' whatsoever. Let me be very clear. Everything that I’ve learned about advertising in that time period is from the show. You know, my interest has been so much more about Peggy as woman, her emotional life and who she is as a person."

Moss has previously said that the time period was never what mattered most to her about playing Peggy. "From the very beginning, from the pilot, I didn't care that it was the '60s. I didn't care that she was a '60s girl," the actress told the LA Times. "I wanted to play her like me, like a woman of any time. Because I think that there are things that she experiences and things that all the women on the show experience that we still experience today -- maybe in varying degrees. So for me, what I connected to was that she was just a young woman ... I just wanted her to be a real person."

But, when you do consider the times, Peggy could be making big moves in the show's seventh and final season. Many have suggested that the character could move on from SC&P and start her own agency. "I don’t have Season 7 on paper, and I would say that if you're talking about [advertising pioneer] Mary Wells, you're talking about the Jackie Robinson of advertising. That is the exception and not the rule," "Mad Men" creator Matt Weiner told HuffPost TV's Maureen Ryan. "The women's movement didn't really even have any traction until the '70s, and Peggy is still an exceptional person with an unusual job and unusually successful for where she is. There's one Mary Wells for all the other thousands of women who are trying to get into that job. I don't think you can name a lot of women who were not at least standing behind a man in an agency."

Don and Peggy

'Mad Men' Season 6 and 7

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