The final half-season, seven episodes, of Mad Men will begin in two weeks. To get you in the mood for the last go-round, here are some tidbits from the series creator Matt Weiner and the cast from reminiscences they shared during a Film Society event at Lincoln Center in New York City over the weekend. For example:
4. Everyone makes fun of the way Aaron Staton (Ken Cosgrove) smokes.
“I had a rule that no one could fake-smoke on the set if they’d never smoked,” Weiner said, fearing their naiveté would show on screen. “I made the horrible mistake with Aaron Staton, where I was like, you have never smoked before. You look terrible at it. And he was like, actually I did smoke for, like, 10 years. And I was like, like that? Like a douchebag? He’s the sweetest person in the world and he still brings it up. He goes, ‘Remember that time you told me I smoked like a douchebag?’” Staton still smokes “like a douchebag” for consistency purposes. “You can see them sort of giving him a hard time in the scene … you can actually see it,” Weiner said of the rest of the cast when filming a smoking scene with Staton.
5. Roger was almost killed off in Season 1.
“The only thing that’s ever been reversed is that I did think that Roger Sterling was going to die in the first season,” Weiner said. “John had another job, and I didn’t know if he wanted to stay with the show.”
There’s plenty more, strictly for Mad Men fans, because a lot of it won’t make any sense unless you’ve followed the series these past few years, in a list at Buzzfeed.