Elisabeth Moss made her Broadway debut in last night’s opening of Speed-the-Plow, and nearly the entire cast of Mad Men was at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre to show their support. They showed up around the same time, hugged and chatted, and showered effusive praise on their castmate, then spent most of the after-party in a similar orbit, never leaving each other’s sides. (Serendipitously, Jon Hamm’s hosting gig on SNL landed on the same weekend, so the group plans to share more happy times at Rockefeller Center on Saturday.) Herewith, we present pieces of chatter with the Mad Men crew.
Matt Weiner, on the season finale and coming back for a third season:
“We’ve just started negotiating. There’s no crisis. I love the show. I have every intention of being back there. [The negotiations] just started very, very late.
If you were crying at the end of episode twelve, you will be hit in the stomach with a sledgehammer at the end of the finale. It’s a completion of the story for the season, which is a different story than last season. I think that when you go back and look at episode one, you’ll see that it was all there. It was about Betty’s adolescence, as opposed to her childhood last season, and about crudeness taking over the world, and it’s sort of about whatever’s going on in their personal lives. There’s a lot that goes on in their personal lives that’s resolved, but what it’s really about is that the world … the change is really under way.â€
Jon Hamm (Don Draper) on SNL’s Sarah Palin gossip:
“They all talked about how she was really polite and totally game. Everybody was very open. They invited her on the show, and whenever you invite somebody to be a guest on your show, you’re not going to treat them terribly. They were very pleased. I don’t think there’s hate. They’re comics. They don’t hate anybody. They just want to get laughs.â€
Elisabeth Moss on Peggy’s hair-volution:
“I love that I got to cut off my hair. There wasn’t much hair evolution before that. It was pretty much a ponytail for many, many, maaaaaaaaaaany episodes, so I was very glad to get the haircut.â€
Bryan Batt on Sal Romano:
“[I want] more torture. More wonderful torture. It’s real. It’s what happened at the time. Gay men did get married. Gay women did get married. They had to conform. There were no other options. People ask me, ‘When are you coming out?’ I say, ‘To what?’ To what would he come out in 1962? There’s no community.â€
Rich Sommer (Harry Crane) on on-set antics:
“I streak the set.â€
John Slattery (Roger Sterling) on being a gossip item in “Rush & Molloyâ€:
“You know, it feels really bad, because it’s totally out of left field. I never said a word of it. In fact, I had an e-mail from a friend of mine, from the person I was with, that said, ‘I can’t believe that. Everything that I said was attributed to you.’ It was a third-party piece, and I called them, and they said, ‘You know what? That’s just the way it is.’ I feel bad about it, and I know they have a job to do, but the fact that I was standing outside of a place and that someone was recounting a story that someone told to them and everything they said was attributed to me, it’s really embarrassing. I was told basically, ‘You know what? Just let it go, because if you make a bigger deal out of it, you’re just making a bigger deal out of it.’ So I said, ‘Okay, whatever, I’ll let it go,’ and I did. What good is it going to do to call someone and say, ‘You know, that thing that was in the paper, I didn’t say that.’â€
Talia Balsam on Mona Sterling’s divorce:
“We don’t know yet what Roger’s going to do. She’s sort of prey to him a little bit. You’re hearing a lot of Roger’s point of view. He may say she’s taking everything. She’s probably pissed off a little bit, but maybe that’s the best way to get half of something. That’s yet to be determined. I would hope that if she’s vindictive enough, maybe she could try to run some of the company. There’s always this thing that Joan Crawford did when her husband left Pepsi-Cola and she went on the board. She sort of was like, ‘Listen, guys, don’t mess with me.’ I would hope that Mona would do something like that. She has it in her.â€
Michael Gladis (Paul Kinsey) on having ratings versus being influential:
“What, you can’t have it all? I think I’d rather be influential myself. I think the executives of AMC might want the ratings, but influential’s good.â€
Vincent Kartheiser (Pete Campbell) on being really stoned:
“I’m just really stoned. Is that bad to say to a magazine? I’m from California, I got a license to do that shit!â€
Related: See more from Speed-the-Plow’s opening night by clicking through our Party Lines Slideshow.