She went stratospheric in the hit ad agency show, but wishes it had happened 10 years earlier. As Christina Hendricks plays a Hollywood mogul, she talks about the whirlwind of fame – and what happens when it stops

It would be too much of a spoiler to reveal the dark secret at the heart of the new comedy drama Small Town, Big Story, but I can say that it’s huge, weird and unbelievable. In the six-part show, Christina Hendricks plays Wendy Patterson, a Los Angeles TV producer who is back in her small home town in Ireland to shoot a big Hollywood production. She has returned, successful and glossy, to the place where that weird experience changed her life – not least because nobody believed her and she was laughed out of town.

Hendricks plays Wendy spiky and tough. “She’s got a real defence mechanism,” she says. “Something extraordinary happened to her and no one has ever believed her. She’s built up a wall, not letting people get too close, because then she’d have to reveal this big secret that, again, they are not going to believe.”