Growing up as Sally Draper gave Kiernan Shipka a strong start to her Hollywood career, but it didn’t make for the most normal childhood.

The Chilling adventures of Sabrina star thought about spending her adolescence Crazy men – and her lack of a typical college experience – in a conversation with Jesse Tyler Ferguson about his Dinner is for me podcast. “I was always on set. I dropped out in first grade, so I was young,” Shipka recalls. “I graduated early. I just did everything. I was kind of loose and wandering.”

Shipka had to reckon with her ignorance of school culture while shooting a teen movie, which forced her to perform an unfamiliar task that most people take for granted. “I didn’t know how to open a locker,” she recalls. “I was filming a high school movie next Crazy men. I was just fifteen. They said, ‘Okay Kiernan, you just walk down the hall and then open the locker.’ And I thought, ‘Okay, great.’ And I walked downstairs and then I got to the locker, and I thought, ‘Oh no, oh no, I never got around to this! This isn’t part of my skill set yet, guys. Someone can teach me.’”

Shipka has essentially no memories of life before her acting career. “I have no reference point for what it’s like not to be in the industry or to be some level of public figure. I was six when I started Crazy menshe said. ‘When I came out, I was still so young that I had to find my footing a bit, and it was a strange time. I think it’s mentally and emotionally when I look back and identify what I was struggling with and I look for the ‘why’. That was because I had somewhat lost this anchor in my life, and because I didn’t go to school anywhere. ”

The actress also clarified that when Sally accidentally discovered her father Don Draper (Jon Hamm) amid illegal dealings on Crazy menshe actually saw something completely different on set. “I reacted to Jon playing Words with Friends on his phone as an eyeline, and not the real deal,” she explained. However, she did have the necessary information to actually recreate the scene: “I definitely had context, but they were so protective of me and my kind of innocence and didn’t expose me to things that were sensitive or more mature. And I always knew what I always responded. I always knew what I was doing.

Shipka said she finally rewatched one from top to bottom Crazy men during the pandemic, and was intrigued by a deeper understanding of her character. “I saw her experiencing things that I felt at that moment in a very natural way,” the actress recalls. “But now, as an adult, I can psychoanalyze and say, ‘Oh no, she was there grieving and acting out.'”

She continued, “I think I understood her at the time as much as she understood herself. As I get older, I understand her in the way I hope she will one day understand herself with therapy. There was something very wild about seeing that, because it wasn’t that I didn’t know what was going on, but I didn’t know what was going on so we won’t know what’s going on with us until later one way.”

Listen to the full conversation between Shipka and Ferguson above.

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