The actor, who has played Roger Sterling on seven seasons of the AMC drama, moves into the director’s chair with his new film, God’s Pocket .
John Slattery on the set of God's Pocket in Yonkers, New York, last summer.
IFC Films
John Slattery's first screen credit is from 1988, on a drama series called Dirty Dozen in Fox's earliest days as a network. The show was filmed in Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists, during the writers' strike of that year. "That was wild," he said in an interview this week in downtown Los Angeles, near the set of Mad Men. "The show itself was a bit of a mess, but I went from never having a real job to being with a bunch of guys in Zagreb, being paid."
Twenty-six years later, after an accomplished acting career in theater, on television, and in movies, Slattery is facing the end of his longest and most recognizable role — as Mad Men's Roger Sterling, whose good-time approach to work and barking familial style disguise that he is a complicated, decent man. We won't see the final seven episodes — the second half of Season 7 — until next year, but the show is wrapping up now.
Less than a year ago, Slattery began directing his first feature, God's Pocket, which is based on Pete Dexter's 1983 novel about a working-class, urban neighborhood. The movie is a crime story, and a character study: In the aftermath of the death of his adult stepson, Mickey Scarpato (Philip Seymour Hoffman) has to overcome a zillion obstacles in order to get the stepson buried and try to satisfy his bereft wife (Christina Hendricks). It's a comic drama, and it opens in theaters this weekend and on VOD on May 14. In an unexpected and tragic circumstance, God's Pocket will also be one of Hoffman's final performances.
Slattery and I discussed his years on Mad Men, what appealed to him about God's Pocket, and working with Hoffman.
Where are you in filming the final Mad Men episodes right now?
John Slattery: Almost done. We finish at the end of June. We're about halfway through shooting the second half of the final season. It's getting close.
What's it like as things are coming to a close?
JS: I'm going to a table read now, and it's at those table reads when there's another sort of hash mark, and it becomes more and more apparent. I can only speak for myself, but it's the kind of thing where you don't want to deal with it until it happens. It will be very emotional, I think. We've all been together for a long time. We all like each other, and have been through a lot in our personal lives throughout this period.
Did you ever consider moving out here? You've lived in New York the whole time.
JS: When we first started shooting, my wife was playing my wife on the show. Our kid was little, and it was shooting during the summer. We would come out here and rent a house. I've lived out here, and my wife went to school out here, and some of her family's out here. I loved L.A., but we'd been living in New York — school, and you just get dug in to a place. The commute is difficult. I won't miss that part of it. Everything else I'll miss.
How did you think of Roger when you first started playing him?
JS: Matt Weiner said I was in a bad mood the whole time, the whole pilot.
Really? Why?
JS: I don't know. I guess I wasn't convinced. I mean, I was convinced of the whole thing, but not my part in it. That might be true.
You don't remember?
JS: I do remember having kind of one foot in and one foot out. I'm older than most of the people in it, and I had been in that situation before. They promise you the world, and then it's, Why did I do this? There wasn't much evidence of Roger. What was there was great, and the whole script was brilliant.
AMC
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