Everyone has to start somewhere. For every massive star that is launched to fame by their first project, there are loads that toil away in obscurity until something breaks then through. Channing Tatum was a stripper. Hugh Jackman was a PE teacher. Everyone did something (apart from overnight success stories, who are of course awful).
And, it turns out, Mad Men star Christina Hendricks was a hand model. And not just any hand model... an Oscar-winning hand model. It turns out she is the owner/operator of the hand on the iconic poster for the 1999 a-different-viewing-experience-following-revelations-about-Kevin-Spacey classic American Beauty.
"Fun fact," she wrote on Instagram. "Wait for it... I used to be a model and sometimes a hand model. This is my hand and another model’s stomach. Proud to be a part of this film in ANY WAY!"
Somehow it has taken twenty years for this to come out. Hendricks has build a massive career and become incredibly famous all while remaining tight-lipped about her mitts' moment in the sun.
Perhaps that's what separates the professionals from the amateurs. If she'd spent the Noughties showing off about her famous hand, boasting about how her subtle fingerwork influenced the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, wagging her fist at people to get let in to exclusive parties and walking around with her paw in a glass dome like David Duchovny in Zoolander, she might have have got the Mad Men gig, and the world of prestige TV would be that much less glamorous.
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