[dropcap]F[/dropcap]or the last seven years, John Slattery has been entertaining viewers as the charming, insouciant Roger Sterling on Mad Men. Creator Matthew Weiner has built an astonishingly dense, thoughtful world, which he has fully realised with a stellar cast of complex characters. AMC’s ad agency drama is one of the most acclaimed series of all time, and Slattery’s Roger, a womanising, hard-drinking, acid-dropping executive, is one of the most beloved characters on the show. As tn2 speaks to Slattery on the phone from New York, it has just started snowing, and he is walking through it. “But other than those things,” he observes, “my day is going along swimmingly.”
Slattery was born and raised in Boston, part of a large Irish Catholic family. He has Irish heritage on “both sides of my family — my mother’s a Mulhern, my father’s a Slattery, so yeah, [our heritage reaches back] about five generations.” He’s visited Ireland several times: “I love it. We rented a house in Clifden [Connemara] a couple of years ago for my parents’ 60th anniversary. Twenty one of us came over, and we wreaked havoc on that little town.”
With the final episodes of Mad Men set to air in a few weeks’ time, Slattery recollects his initial casting. “I read for the part of Don Draper,” he explains. “I got the script, and I wasn’t sure they hadn’t made a mistake, so I called back and said, ‘Are you sure that’s the part they want me to read for?’ and they said ‘Yeah, that’s it!’ So I did my homework, went in and read, and they were very serious. […] They told me they had cast that part, and they wanted me to play a different part, which was Roger. Roger wasn’t that evident in the pilot — there were a couple of scenes, they were good scenes, but it was pretty much all potential. Matt Weiner, recognising that, said, ‘I promise you this will be a good part,’ and it was, and it is.”
Before Roger, Slattery’s career had been ticking along nicely for two decades, including a supporting role in Desperate Housewives and a memorable guest appearance on Sex and the City as a politician with an unusual fetish. When Mad Men came along in 2007, Slattery found himself presented with the role that would define his career. Roger is best known for his quick-fire wit, but he also stirs a lot of emotion, particularly in his scenes with sometime-partner Joan (Christina Hendricks). When asked about the balance of humour and drama, Slattery notes, “I think that’s ideal, that’s the kind of character I wish I could play all the time — someone sophisticated enough to get both sides, to be able to recognise the weight of some situations and the ridiculousness of others.”
You don’t have to worry about ‘Is anyone gonna know where I’m coming from? Is anyone gonna understand what I mean by a look, or a gesture, or a particular line reading?’ You just have to play the moment, and all the groundwork that’s been done for seven years plays into everything.
Although Roger initially spent the majority of his time strolling from office to office, ogling the female employees and delivering fantastically sardonic one-liners, in the later seasons he has become a more complicated character. As the show moved closer to the 1970s, Weiner explored Roger’s existential dissatisfaction, undergoing a crisis of masculinity in the face of changing social norms. Slattery observes, “I think it’s a tribute to the writing — there aren’t a lot of characters on television grappling with those kind of social, emotional, existential issues, as informed by all that they’ve gone through. That’s what’s fun about that character, and the challenge of it — to remember where he was from, where he started out ten years earlier, dealing with issues of the early sixties, and then weirdly experimenting as the decade went on, trying to find his relevance, and his interest, and stay interested and stay alive.”
Although the question of masculinity becomes fraught in Mad Men’s later seasons, both Roger and Don Draper are seen as fantasy figures by a lot of men. When asked what it is about this particular time period that appeals so much to modern viewers, Slattery suggests, “I think there was less regulation on what one could say and do, and I think that’s what at least part of the sixties and the seventies was all about — getting at a lot of that rigour and regulation, questioning authority, questioning the government, questioning the sexual mores that were set up post-World War II, and the conservatism. I think that these characters are ones that people can live through vicariously because of that.”
The brilliant rapport between Slattery and Jon Hamm is one of the strongest elements of the show. “[Those scenes with Jon] are always the highlight for me, they are always great. We work really well together, and we’re good friends — we were from the minute we met, really. From the first day, the very first scene I did was with him, on the first day of shooting,” Slattery recalls. “When you work with someone as talented as he is and as subtle as he is, the good thing about that character is, he plays his cards very close to the vest, and it isn’t an easy thing to perform. It’s probably easier to play someone who is a lot more obvious. I admire him for that, and it’s a lot of fun to work off of, because it keeps you alive, working with someone who is working on that level. And he’s got a great sense of humour! Those scenes are always a lot of fun.”
That’s the kind of character I wish I could play all the time — someone sophisticated enough to get both sides, to be able to recognise the weight of some situations and the ridiculousness of others.
Seven seasons in, Slattery still finds plenty to savour in his character, and when asked about his favourite Roger moment, he explains, “I actually think that emotionally, the shows that are coming up are really the culmination of this whole thing, as they should be. The scenes we did […] were really wonderfully written and directed, and I think those might be the highlight, and I can’t really tell you a lot about those, but because of the satisfaction of playing a character that’s so well-established — all of those characters are so well-established — you don’t have to worry about ‘Is anyone gonna know where I’m coming from? Is anyone gonna understand what I mean by a look, or a gesture, or a particular line reading?’ You just have to play the moment, and all the groundwork that’s been done for seven years plays into everything.”
Saying goodbye to the show was predictably “sad and emotional”, as Slattery describes, “We had been kind of inching up on it, […] people had their last days of shooting in the weeks winding down, so then the final day was [the last in] a long line of goodbyes. There was a big party and a late night. It was heavier than I thought it was going to be. I knew it would be sad, but I wasn’t quite sure what it would feel like. Everybody was pretty deeply affected by it, I think.”
Since he finished filming, Slattery has kept busy. After appearing in the fourth series of Arrested Development, he is returning to Netflix this summer in the star-studded Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, the prequel to David Wain and Michael Showalter’s cult 2001 comedy. “It was kinda crazy in that everyone that was in the original has remained very busy, so […] we were trying to accommodate everyone’s schedule — you know, Amy [Poehler] and Bradley [Cooper] and Paul [Rudd], those are the people I worked with, and they were all over the place. I love David Wain, and Michael Showalter, and I had never worked with those guys before and it was a lot of fun.” Last year, Slattery directed God’s Pocket, starring Christina Hendricks and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, and is currently planning his next directing project: “I have a story that I like that I’m trying to work out the legal end of. As far as acting, I did a movie called Spotlight that was written and directed by Tom McCarthy, about the Boston Globe uncovering the scandal with abusive priests in the Catholic church. It’s a great story. I’ve just been looking around, trying to figure out what’s next, waiting til I stumble across something that gets me excited.”
The final episodes of Mad Men start on April 9 on Sky Atlantic. All 8 episodes of Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp will be available on Netflix from July 17.
