Jessica Paré, the Mad Men actress who spent a decade outgrowing one song

Jessica Paré

Photo: CFC_in_LA_(Jessica_Paré).jpg: Canadian Film Centre from Toronto, Canada derivative work: César / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 5, 1980 Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Occupation	Actress and television director
Known for	Brooklyn, Hot Tub Time Machine, Wicker Park

For a large part of the television audience, Jessica Paré is still standing in a Manhattan living room in a short black dress, singing a French pop song to her new husband’s colleagues while Don Draper tries to work out whether he is charmed or humiliated. That scene in Mad Men made her the most discussed new face on the show and, for a while, the most argued over. What she did once the show ended is the less told and more revealing story: she stayed on a network military drama long enough to learn how it was built, and then she started directing it. Her current role, a mother rebuilding a life after her husband’s fraud in the Netflix series Crew Girl, puts her back near the centre of a show for the first time in years.

She came to acting through her father. Anthony Paré had acted and taught drama, touring with a theatre company, before becoming chair of the education department at McGill University; her mother, Louise Mercier, worked as a conference interpreter and acted in amateur productions. Paré grew up in Montreal’s Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood with three brothers, speaking English and French, and caught the bug as a child while helping her father learn his lines for a production of The Tempest.

She went to Villa Maria, a private Catholic school in the city, studied drama at TheatreWorks and acted in amateur productions. A small part in the television film Bonanno: A Godfather’s Story, shot during her final year of high school, settled the question. She left the fine arts programme at Dawson College and gave herself two years to make acting work, assisting a photographer on car shoots in the meantime.

The break came when she auditioned for a bit part in Denys Arcand’s Stardom and Arcand gave her the lead instead: a small-town hockey player turned into an international supermodel. Stardom closed the Cannes Film Festival in 2000 to mixed reviews, but it made Paré the Canadian industry’s “it girl.” The following year she co-starred with Piper Perabo and Mischa Barton in Lost and Delirious, a boarding-school love story that divided critics at Sundance while earning praise for its three leads. She played Napoleon’s mistress in the miniseries Napoléon and turned up as a pop singer in Deepa Mehta’s Bollywood/Hollywood.

Hollywood was slower to decide what to do with her. Her American debut, Wicker Park in 2004, was a supporting part, and the WB drama Jack & Bobby, in which her character was destined to become First Lady, lasted a single season. She went back to Canadian work that gave her more to play with: the vampire rock comedy Suck, for which she learned to play the bass and earned a Canadian Comedy Award nomination, and a brief turn as a groupie in Hot Tub Time Machine.

Then, in 2010, Matthew Weiner cast her as Megan Calvet, the secretary at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce who ends the fourth season of Mad Men engaged to Don Draper. The fifth season opened with Megan’s birthday performance of “Zou Bisou Bisou,” a 1960 hit for Gillian Hills, and Paré’s recording was released as a single in March 2012. That same year she joined The Jesus and Mary Chain on stage in Buffalo and Toronto to sing “Just Like Honey.” Over the show’s last three seasons Megan left advertising to act, moved to Los Angeles and watched her marriage come apart, and Paré stayed with the series until its finale in 2015.

The reception was never simple. Megan split the audience more sharply than almost any late addition to the show: some viewers dismissed her as bad for women, a character who used her looks to get ahead, while others saw the first woman in Don’s life who was not boxed in by the rules that held back Betty, Peggy and Joan. Some of the hostility landed on the actress rather than on the writing, and much of it missed that Megan was built to be the thing Don wanted and could not keep, which made her read as thin to viewers looking for another Peggy. Paré answered by not engaging. “I don’t read any of that stuff,” she told Yahoo TV in 2015. “I think I have to be really careful, just for my own fragile actor’s psyche.” The larger risk was the song: a performance that memorable can turn an actor into a moment rather than a career.

Her answer to that risk was patience. In 2017 she joined the CBS series SEAL Team as Amanda “Mandy” Ellis, the CIA liaison to David Boreanaz’s Bravo Team, and stayed for all seven seasons, as a series regular for the first four and in a recurring role after the show moved to Paramount+. She used the second phase to step behind the camera, directing “Nine Ten” in 2021, “Crawl, Walk, Run” in 2022 and “A Perfect Storm” in the final season in 2024. Between seasons she kept working in film, as a department store supervisor in John Crowley’s Brooklyn and opposite Gabriel Byrne in Matt Bissonnette’s Death of a Ladies’ Man, a Montreal story set to the songs of Leonard Cohen.

Her recent choices lean towards mothers with something to protect. In Jody Wilson’s The Bearded Girl, which premiered at the Fantasia festival in 2025, she plays Lady Andre, the domineering head of a sideshow dynasty of bearded women who refuses to let her daughter change the act. In Crew Girl, which Netflix released on 10 September 2026, she is Ella Emerson-Tao, who flees California with her daughter Teagan, played by Miku Martineau, after her husband is exposed for financial fraud, and returns to her Massachusetts hometown, where Teagan becomes coxswain of a boys’ rowing crew. Developed by Vivian Lin and Morwyn Brebner and filmed in British Columbia, the series was renewed for a second season within weeks of its premiere.

Paré, born in Montreal on 5 December 1980, was married to the writer and producer Joseph M. Smith from 2007 to 2010. She has since built a family with John Kastner, the Quebec musician best known as the singer of the hardcore punk band The Asexuals. She has described herself as Catholic and has been blunt about the question that followed Megan around: “Of course I’m a feminist,” she told Fashion magazine.

The renewal of Crew Girl means Ella Emerson-Tao will return, and the second season will show whether the writers give the mother at the edge of the boathouse a story of her own, or keep her, as Mad Men once kept Megan, as the person whose life bends around someone else’s ambition.