Basket of Kisses

I loved speaking with Joel. He is just so nice, and funny. Dry-funny, my favorite kind. With lots of stories. We spoke for over an hour, and could have kept going. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as we enjoyed ourselves.

RKL:So, cool!

JM: So, cool. Yeah, I’ve been reading the website from the get-go and I thought, well maybe they would want to talk to Freddy Rumsen.

RKL: We totally want to talk to Freddy Rumsen! We’re very excited. So, funny thing. I am home from work today and I was flipping the channels and I happened to catch you on an episode of Dharma and Greg. I’d remembered you from it but it was fun to catch that today.

JM: Yeah, some of those are really funny, every once in awhile I’ll see one.

RKL: It was a whole, the-guys-all-get-drunk-adventure episode.

JM: The one for the Olympics?

RKL: Yup.

JM: Oh, that was the best episode of them all, I think.

RKL: Yeah it was great.

JM: It was hysterical.

RKL: It was hysterical.

JM: How do they make those big ships fly? was the funniest line in the whole thing–Shea D’Lyn who played the Marilyn Monroe type character. How do they make those big ships fly? Yeah, that was one of my favorite ones we ever did.

RKL: Well good! I was like, I can’t believe I’m catching this; this is great!

JM: Well that’s a godsend, when you have a show in syndication. Here I was thinking I had car trouble today, and replaced my own battery, which I feel real big about myself now. Wow, look at me, mechanical guy, I can take a battery out of a car and put a new one in, but, let alone, Dharma and Greg was on so I probably made a hundred dollars.

RKL: Great!

JM: Battery’s free.

RKL: I’m impressed; I can barely change the batteries in my digital recorder.

JM: (chuckles and dryly compliments my pause between ‘my’ and ‘digital’)

[Matt Weiner]… went to four people and said Do you think Joel Murray’s too big for Freddy Rumsen, too big for the part? and all four people said Who? So I got the part thanks to the extensive PR I’ve done throughout my career.

RKL:  How did the role of Freddy come to you?

JM: I had seen the first couple [Mad Men episodes]. My wife and I watch it religiously. And then all of a sudden I got an audition for it, and I was so excited, because I thought it was so fantastic. And I also had been semi-pigeonholed for years as being a sitcom guy, and my agent sent me on a dramatic role, and I thought, this is weird because they never do that. And it turns out that Matt Weiner had requested me, he’d seen my previous work and said, There’s something sad about this guy that I want. So I went in and I read, and Matt was there, and he gave me a couple of notes and I did it again. And then he stood up and he was, Fantastic, fantastic, brilliant, great, great, great, so I walked out of there feeling pretty good. And then I got a call that I had gotten the part. And unbeknownst to me, Matt Weiner then walked around to his offices, and he said he asked four people, because he wanted sort of unknowns for the show, unrecognizable people, and he said he went to four people and said Do you think Joel Murray’s too big for Freddy Rumsen, too big for the part? and all four people said Who? So I got the part thanks to the extensive PR I’ve done throughout my career.

RKL: (laughing) That’s awesome!

JM: Yeaah.

RKL: I definitely recognized you when I saw you, but not like, to the point where I knew your name. I had to dig.

JM: Well I’m one of those guys who looks familiar and people don’t know why. I’ll be somewhere and people will ask me, Didn’t we get drunk in a bar in Arizona one time? And I’m like, Well, could be. I’ve certainly been in bars in Arizona. Anyway, people always recognize me as someone other than something I was on. I just kinda look like a regular guy, I guess. And everybody that watches the show says, You know, I’m in advertising, and I gotta say, you look like five of the guys I’ve worked with over the years. There was just always that guy in the office who was, you know, kind of a lush, kind of a funny guy.

RKL: Yeah, you do look like that guy.

JM: Mm hmm. Well anyway, I look younger than I do on the show.

RKL: So actually our writer hullaballoo, who I believe you met at the [Mad Men musical] revue; she said the surprise sexy guy was you.

JM: That was her article, huh.

RKL: Yup.

JM: Yeah I wanted to print that out and blow it up and put it on my wall somewhere. Unprecedented for me.

RKL: We’re glad we can help.

JM: Well I’ve got a hot wife, I must do something right. 19 years.

RKL: Very nice.

JM: People look at me and look at her and go, What’s up there?

Don’t play him drunk. You’re a functional alcoholic. You’re not drunk. You’re just full of liquor.

RKL: How do you work with playing somebody who is degenerating?

JM: Oh, a lifetime of research. (laughing) I’m the youngest of nine kids, I watched some older brothers degenerate a bit—no! How do I work doing that? It’s funny, I had different ways to play some of the things, and Matt had notes on it and he was like, No, that’s just kind of the way you are. Don’t play him drunk. You’re a functional alcoholic. You’re not drunk. You’re just full of liquor. And he was right, you know? How do you play a degenerating guy? I just do what I do. The first scene that I ever had was with Elisabeth Moss, and you know I was a fan of the show, and I’m in this scene and I’m just staring at her. A big part of acting is listening and reacting, but all I could do was watch her. I knew my lines and they came; the ‘basket of kisses’ scene, but I’m doing a scene with her I’m like, She’s fantastic! Wow, is she great! So I was just kind of tuned in and entranced with her in the first scene I did. And the rest of ‘em I’m always feeling like, you know I’m an older guy and my job’s on the line, so I better be listening and tuned in to what everyone is saying, just so I have the proper reaction to it. You know? It’s all important. What everybody else is doing or saying.

RKL: I would imagine there’s an extra effort to holding the focus if you’re so saturated.

JM: Right. And trying not to close one eye when I do it. To focus better.

RKL: I’d just been starting to re-watch Six Month Leave, even right when you contacted me. I’ve been watching it over the last couple of days, In addition to all your stuff, her scene with Don when she finds out you’ve been fired–she’s so extraordinary. She’s just mesmerizing.

JM: She’s phenomenal. And like I said the first time I had the scene with her, all I could do was look at her and go, Wow, is she good. Wow, this is great! She’s wonderful, I mean the whole cast is great.

RKL: It’s really something; there’s not a throwaway among you.

JM: I mean, Six Month Leave, the whole episode is phenomenal. Everything from the start to the finish is so good.

RKL: Yeah. There’s rarely a moment on the show that’s a mistake, but that one was pretty much a perfect episode. I still, when Don says ‘Tilden Katz’, I get tears in my eyes. I just think that’s amazing.

JM: (laughing) We laughed every time he did that. I don’t know why. And we knew the line was coming, and we still laughed. Every time he did it.

But there’s something about being wet in front of people that brings back a sense memory from childhood, you’re just, Ohmygod, ohgod, whaddya–aah! And it kind of comes natural, when you’re in a room and your pants are wet and people are laughing at you.

RKL: The peeing scene. Legendary.

JM: Ahh, the peeing scene.

RKL: What kind of instructions did Matt give you on that, and what is it emotionally like in terms of the humiliation factor? Bryan [Batt] laughing at you and all of that.

JM: Well, Matt said I want you to give the pre-presentation well. And I do the spiel about the Samsonite like I’m on top of it, kind of thing. Then, basically I was staring out the window, and I was hooked up to tubes. I had the special effects guys underneath the desk at that point. And I had one tube like, in my crotch and one tube down my pants leg and so I’m standing there and all of a sudden liquid, alcohol—rubbing alcohol, ‘cause it showed up best on gray pants, apparently, starts to go, and I’m s’posed to kind of turn around when they say my name. It’s interesting; when they shot it, they actually had a shot of it starting to run down the front of my pants. They didn’t use that shot in the final piece. It was kind of after the fact; it came out of my shoes before it came out of the front of me, and I was surprised by that. But there’s something about being wet in front of people that brings back a sense memory from childhood, you’re just, Ohmygod, ohgod, whaddya–aah! And it kind of comes natural, when you’re in a room and your pants are wet and people are laughing at you. You just gotta react like you would react. It wasn’t very difficult to play. And then of course I’m supposed to pass out almost immediately after I sit down, so there wasn’t a lot to do there except go unconscious and listen to the rest of the scene.

RKL: It was so powerful.

JM: So it really wasn’t that hard. But it was goofy.

RKL: What about Rich Sommers’ impression of you, where did that come from? Was that scripted or did that come from some thing where Rich does impressions of you?

JM: It was scripted, and I went up to him and told him how I was gonna say it. It was, rather than a curse, it was more questioning. Oh, Jesus, kind of, like I was talking to Jesus as opposed to swearing. I told him that was how I was going to do it, so when he did it he at least had that insight. It’s odd. I have a few friends–Pat Finn, a very funny guy–who does imitations. And it’s weird when you’re not famous and people do imitations of you, but I guess I have a few things that I do a lot, that people can make fun of behind my back. But every once in a while I hear an impression and—I don’t know. I wonder how people are who get imitated all the time, how they take it. It’s sort of okay.

RKL: Did you know in Season One how this was gonna play out? I know to a degree that Matt [Weiner] doesn’t plan too far ahead.

JM: Nope. I never had a clue. He kept telling me I had a big episode coming up in the second season. But in Season One I didn’t know anything. I was just kind of happy to be there. The second season he told me a couple times, You know you got a really good episode coming up. And finally like a day or so before I got the script, he said, Yeah, good news and bad news. You’ve got a really great script next week. And that’s all he said. And then I read the script and found out, Oh yeah. Great episode, but then I’m going away.

RKL: But he [Matt] has intimated that you’re not necessarily done.

JM: He’s told me that, yeah. It’s gone from Oh yeah you’re definitely back, yeah Freddy comes back, they just send you away for awhile, to Yeah we gotta find a way to get you back in the script. So I’m clinging to the previous one, Yeah you’re definitely back as opposed to We gotta find a way to bring you back. That didn’t sound as positive.

RKL: No, not as positive. And at this point of course we’re hoping that Matt is definitely back.

JM: Right. So meanwhile I’m trying to work out and lose weight as if I had gone away and quite drinking, just in case.

RKL: Good thinking!

JM: But you know, I lost like ten pounds between Season One and Season Two. And Janie [Bryant] puts me in little tiny suits. I’m like a 44 long, and she puts me in like a 40 regular, so it looks like I’m fatter than I am. She and Matt had some conversation that it would be funny if this guys suits were nice suits but they didn’t quite fit anymore. So I go to my costume fittings and it’s just brutal. Imagine an actress going in who’s a size 6 and they’re putting her in a bunch of size 2s. I was just like, Are you serious?

RKL: I promise you I have no problem imagining clothing being too tight.

JM: Gotcha.

RKL: And she’s notoriously a torture device; Janie, right? I guess in your case it’s special.

JM: I don’t know about everybody else but for me, yeah, I might as well be strapped into a corset. Pants that aren’t even coming close to fitting. She’s like, Yeah. Those are great. Alright, we’re gonna let ‘em out a half an inch. And I’m just, What?! So I’m like a sausage from Milwaukee, I’m just really packed in the outfit.

RKL: Yikes.

JM: So then the second season I came back and she was gonna start putting me in 38s, and stuff like this, jacketwise, and she was like, Hmm, it’s a little loose, I don’t know. And I think I managed to stay in 40s the second season. But the first season they were insanely tight. The second they were a little looser.

RKL: See, and that’s part of why you were the surprise sexy, and not the obvious sexy.

JM: (laughs) Yeah. When I’m spilling out of my outfit, I don’t know. Fat guy in a little suit.

RKL: That final scene by the cab. I’ve heard over the years many actors describe how the last episode [of whatever show they were on] was so emotional. How was that for you?

JM: Well, you know, it was bittersweet all week when I was gonna have to be leaving. And that was the last scene I ended up doing. And I’m working all week with Jon Hamm and John Slattery, and these guys are just really great guys to hang out with. There was one day when we were shooting that episode when all of a sudden Slattery’s kid was on the set, and we’re outside, and we started throwing a football around. And the three of us could really throw like a football, I mean, as far as actors go, sure, but no, as far as men go. We’re whipping this ball around. And it was like a little show of testosterone because we’re all throwing these really hard perfect spirals, in 1960s suits, which was just kind of a weird look. And then you throw one to the kid real soft and then you get it back and whip it back. Then to be acting with these guys too who are so great; it was like a really good round of golf or a really good sporting event, in a way. The dinner scene was great, and then that final scene–I want to say it was Robin Veith–brought by some beer. And Kater Gordon [Matt’s writing assistant]. Who was actually a cocktail waitress in the Chuck-A-Luck den of inequity [the underground nightclub].

RKL: I did not know that!

JM: She’s cute as a button. We were at one of the premiere parties and she came up and said hi and my wife goes, Oh, who’s the cutie you got the crush on, and I’m like, Wha-hah? Whah? Whaddaya mean? My wife spotted that one real quick. Not that anything happened or anything.

RKL: Women are amazing like that; please.

It’s everything a guy frets about in the middle of the night. Myself, I wake up in the middle of this big house, and there’s five sleeping people in here, and you gotta think how am I gonna support all these people. What am I gonna do.

JM: Mm hmm. So, we’d had a few beers before that scene is what I’m saying. It was like one in the morning when we shot that, so it was late, it was sort of real. We had a bit of a buzz finally after playing sort of buzzed for a day and a half, and of course I had great words. It’s real easy to act when the words are that good. And that final scene, the words are just perfect. It’s everything a guy frets about in the middle of the night. Myself, I wake up in the middle of this big house, and there’s five sleeping people in here, and you gotta think how am I gonna support all these people. What am I gonna do. It’s the same thing, well, who am I if I don’t go to work. If I don’t go to that office every day. The words were just so perfect, and to be able to say goodbye at the end of that, as compared to goodnight. It just rang so true, so loudly.

RKL: It was a perfect scene.

JM: And the cabbie; the guy who owned the checker cab. He was just loving it. He was an old actor, and in between takes he was like, I just gotta tell ya, I am just loving this. Can you imagine–here I’m just a guy renting out my cab. Then actually I get to play the cabbie. Then actually I get to be kinda part of this thing. This is so great!

RKL: That’s wonderful.

JM: Yeah, Oh thanks!. Glad you’re having fun. Drive me away now, I’m done.

RKL: How do you treat playing a guy who’s funny differently than being a funny guy?

JM: There were some scenes where I was being dramatic, I thought, and it came off funny. And there were scenes where the guy just had funny lines. And you’re just a guy who’s all of a sudden come up with a good line. There’s a little bit of that happy-with-yourself-after-you-say-it response. I’m used to doing comedy, so I’m used to trying to get a laugh, but to act as a guy who is trying to get a laugh is another thing. You push it a little bit as opposed to how I might be ordinarily.

RKL: That also speaks to the quality of the show. On a lot of sitcoms all the people are funny and there’s no acknowledgment that people are funny because it’s how their scripted world works. Here you’ve got a character who plays Mozart on his zipper, who just is a funny guy, and then you’ve got Sterling who knows he’s being funny. It’s different, it’s a little bit of a step up from on sitcoms with everyone being so clever.

JM: Right. It’s a little bit pushed, acting funny. If you’re sitting around a table with 5, 10 comedians, you’d be real low-key; you’d just kind of slide things under the door for jokes. But if you’re office funny, if you’re civilian funny, you’re pushing it a little bit. I didn’t give a whole lot of thought into the difference of that; I’m not crazy method. But once you put me in a really tight suit, I just go Freddy all of a sudden.

RKL: And you know, almost everyone is saying that. What you said about the words, the words are there and it’s just easy, and the costuming on the show, it makes everybody’s job easier.

JM: Mm hmm. Once I look in the mirror and I look like one of my uncles from my youth, it just kind of comes naturally. It’s not that hard.

I don’t know if Freddy was ahead of his time, but when you are a guy who goes to lunch at noon every day and is planning on having 6-7 drinks, you’re always kind of looking for people to do your work. I think he might have found this girl that he thought, Boy this chick could do my stuff sitting down. She’s great.

RKL: Earlier you described your first impression of working with Elisabeth [Moss]. Can you talk about Freddie’s relationship with Peggy? Because it is just so sweet.

JM: I don’t know if Freddy was ahead of his time, but when you are a guy who goes to lunch at noon every day and is planning on having 6-7 drinks, you’re always kind of looking for people to do your work. I think he might have found this girl that he thought, Boy this chick could do my stuff sitting down. She’s great. I don’t know if he purposely got her promotions. I mean, he talked about It’s like watching a dog play the piano. She’s freakish at first to him, but she got promoted nonetheless. So I don’t know if it was Freddy that championed her so much as Draper. I think Freddy always thought, Well, this chick could do all my work; I could be at the bar all afternoon. I wouldn’t even have to come back. But I think her actual successes came through Don seeing what I had said, and giving it to her. All I did was say Hey, look at the talking dog I got. I think he was more the champion; Don was, than Freddy was.

RKL: And certainly she’s loyal to Don as well, but her loyalty to Freddy in Six Month Leave was really touching.

JM: There was a scene when I come in after I wet myself, and I ask her how the presentation went. I just went in and we did the scene, and the first take was just, Wow, that felt really cool, just the way she played it. I got to play it because of the way she played it, and when I came off, one of the costumers was crying. One of our regular costumer girls! There were tears in her eyes from the first take of the scene, and I was like, Geez. Something’s working here. It was nice. A lot of that was because she [Elisabeth] played it so well, which allowed me to play it in a way where I wasn’t that embarrassed even though I was completely embarrassed. And it came out very sweet.

RKL: Yeah. It did. It did. And then later she says to Don, I love Freddy. In the office environment today, we say Oh I love that person. We say that all the time. But those words at that time; I think that was pretty strong. Whether she’s right or not—I mean, I love your take that it was just about getting somebody who would do your work. But you were also very warm to her. You gave her Home run, Ballerina, I mean, there’s a warmth to your character that she also responds to.

JM: Right. I guess I was just nice to her, which a lot of men in that time weren’t doing at all. And you know– a guy with a war background, he’s seen all kinds of shit and death and killing and things like that, I guess your priorities are in order, too.

I worked with an actress years ago and she used to go on about the fact that I looked like her dad, who had passed away, and we got along famously. Bonnie Hunt, for that matter. She said I looked like her dad.

RKL: You [Freddy] also say something about having a daughter turning 30, so you obviously have experience with daughters. And way back in the subtext, it seems that Peggy’s father has died, and it feels recent, like in the last five years.

JM: So I may have been a father figure to her too, in a way. I remember I worked with an actress years ago and she used to go on about the fact that I looked like her dad, who had passed away, and we got along famously. Bonnie Hunt, for that matter. She said I looked like her dad.

RKL: We love Bonnie Hunt. God, we love Bonnie Hunt.

Right after the interview, I email Deborah a few highlights, including this tidbit. Her response? We LOVE Bonnie Hunt! I was all, I KNOW!

RKL: What do you imagine is the history with Don? Do you have a backstory for you two? Because he’s also pretty fiercely loyal.

JM: Yeah! Well I think there has to be, but we haven’t seen anything and I don’t know. I imagine that maybe I was above him at one point, and maybe helped him along the way, and maybe that’s where his loyalty came–that I didn’t stand in his way at all, that I helped him instead of hindered him. Again, another guy who could do all my work. I always figured in my mind that he had been under me and surpassed me in the company.

RKL: Well God knows what Freddy Rumsen doesn’t need is more responsibility.

JM: Nooo. No.

RKL: You’re just right where you are.

We are laughing.

RKL: You come from this family with a lot of performers in it.

JM: Yeah. I am the ninth in my family. My brother Brian started acting first, at the Second City in Chicago, and then my brother Billy used to hang around there and siblings used to drink for free, so they said, Well, why don’t you get in this thing, and he all of a sudden was hired, and in one of the touring companies.

RKL: And whatever happened to him?

JM: Bill? He’s working. He’s making Page Six a lot lately; kind of cracking me up. He’s an enigma. He’s a very intelligent actor and he’s made some great choices over the years, and he’s managed to stay away from doing schlock generally, and he’s had a fabulous career. Very, very interesting guy. There’s a lot of facets to him. He can take a room from zero to sixty, or from sixty to zero in a matter of seconds. That’s always interesting to see.

RKL: That is a great line—about anybody, much less him.

JM: I had just gotten my first part in One Crazy Summer. I tried calling my mom, to tell her I got the part. I tried calling a couple people and I couldn’t get hold of anybody, and it’s 1985 so nobody had a cell phone. I called Billy and I told him I got the third lead in the movie, and he was like, Oh. Oh Joel. Joel. You know I was expecting so much more of you. Do you really want to do this? I’d think about it. Acting it’s a terrible way of life, and people will suck the life out of you, and it’s a life of rejection, and he went into this whole thing. And I just couldn’t help thinking in my Hampton Inn in Hyannisport that I was sitting in—he’s sitting in like a ten million dollar house, telling me this. And I was like, Hmm, guess I’ll take that with a grain of salt. Like, Okay. I guess he expects more of me. I’ll keep working on that.

RKL: Yeeah.

JM: My brother Johnny is an actor, he was in a movie called Moving Violations, and he’s getting back into acting; he’d quit for years. He was writing and doing different things. And my brother Brian I said first, he’s been a character actor and been in all kinds of stuff. And I have a sister who is a nun, a Dominican nun, who travels the world doing a one-woman-show as Catherine of Siena.

RKL: I’ve read about that; that’s amazing.

JM: Ooh, you should go out of your way to see it.

RKL: Okay!

JM: Yeah, when you hit the one hour mark, and you’re sitting in a church watching a show, that’s when the seats get really uncomfortable. I don’t think churches were meant to be sat in for longer than an hour. For the past 3-4 years we’ve been trying to get her to get it down to about 45 minutes but she’s not giving in there. But she’s been all over the place; she’s done it in Australia and Vietman and weird places. She’s done it in different languages. And it’s basically her getting up and improvising this 16 year old girl for an hour and a half. Which is—odd, ‘cause she’s much older than 16.

RKL: That’s wild.

JM: Acting family. We’re not the Baldwins but we do okay.

RKL: Do you miss doing improv?

JM: I do. And I do it occasionally out here. I’m kind of the substitute guy for a group called Beer Shark Mice which is really the best guys in LA. They all came from Chicago; David Koechner and Michael Coleman and Pat Finn and Neil Flynn and Peter Hulne. When two of them are not available, I get to go in. It doesn’t happen enough. It’s kind of a young man’s game in the fact that like, do you really go down and improvise, do an eleven o’clock show on a Thursday night? I know you live in New York so life is later there.

RKL: Life may be later here but I’m getting old, you know?

JM: You understand what I’m talking about, then.

RKL: Totally. I have my feet in a few things or my fingers or I have some part of me in a few things, including doing some singing. And that was a late night last night, performing at an open jam, which I could only do because I had a day off today. When we went and saw Rich [Sommer] doing a show with UCB, I was inspired. I’ve done improv and it’s one more thing on my list of things, I’m like, Should I go back in? And I look at it and one thought is that it’s always ten guys on stage to one woman and that sounds really fun for me. But it is younger. And there’s an energy there that I just don’t know if I still have it. So I get it. I hear ya.

JM: We do these Second City alumni things out here, we’ll get up and we’ll do it. It’s hard when you’ve got people from different schools of thought getting up and improvising, as opposed to the guys you worked with when you were younger. You’ve got four guys who are trying to make the other guys look good, and you’ve got one guy who’s trying to make himself look good. And it’s like, Wait a minute. That doesn’t work. When you’re playing by different rules, it just doesn’t meld quite right. But when it’s good, it’s really fantastic. Again, to get me to go down to Hollywood, which is like 35 minutes, and then spend 15 minutes finding someplace to park, and even if there’s valet parking sometimes it takes 15 minutes to get that done. And then go do a show, you know? Ehhh. It’s just not always the top of my list after I’ve coached basketball that afternoon. I guess what I miss is the original group of guys I was doing it with. If I could do it with them at eleven o’clock on Thursday I’d be happy, but no, they’re not around. They’re off doing different things, living in different cities.

RKL: So tell me about the musical revue. What was your involvement in that?

JM: They called; Mike Uppendahl, the director of Six Month Leave, and Robin Veith all of a sudden got together with David Carbonara, who is the musical director, and they said they were going to do this show. David wanted to do it, and Mike and Robin said Yeah, we’ve done things like that, and let’s brainstorm, so they called me and said, We want you to be the emcee. And Matt wants you to be the emcee, too. So I went down one day like a week before, I was like, Let’s go over the script and hash some things out. We went to Robin Veith’s apartment; she’s got like a hipster apartment, downtown LA, kind of a scary neighborhood, a great building. So we went down there and read the script. And there were intros, and ins and outs. Not a whole lot of funny. And they were like, Yeah, you’ll find stuff. And again, the wrong guy for the wrong job; just me remembering everybody’s name—I’m just not a good name guy. And so there were a few moments of absolute panic where I was about to introduce somebody in about six seconds, and I don’t have the name yet. Aaaannd… and then all of a sudden the name would come out fine. And I was like, Hooh! Alright. Now I get to go offstage and drink some more scotch.

So we met, and it was gonna be casual and it was gonna be laid back, and they talked about Dean Martin and things like that. And then I was gonna sing a song, and I suggested Scotch and Soda, and they were like, Fine, perfect, Freddy, right. And I went in one day and did it with David Carbonara and the piano player from what ended up being the orchestra, the Chivas 13, and did it a couple times, and they were, Great. And I was, Like, really? You got an hour set aside for me and we’re done in eight minutes. Okay. Alright. So we just sat around and talked for 45 minutes, and there were other people coming and going. Melinda McGraw was there before me, so I got to see a little bit of her, but I didn’t get to see anybody else. The day of the show we were there at like eleven in the morning, all day, and it was a combination tech rehearsal and show rehearsal, where nobody had seen anything. It came together in the last second, but it was really funny in that, like, when I rehearsed my song, in the beginning we had no sound system, it was just me in the middle of a 13-piece band, standing in the middle of them, which is—you say you sing, so you can imagine—it was just so cool. I’m with ma band! Alright.

RKL: It sounds fantastic.

JM: It went just neat as can be. And as each person came up and showed their gift, and there were a couple of people who were, ooh, I don’t know, and sure enough, there was one actor who was cut. It wasn’t anybody from the show; it was an outsider. It was funny, some of the ‘pros’ that we thought were gonna be the people holding the thing together were let go as compared to our actors. The night of the show we’re all dressed up in zoot suits and we’re waiting for this to happen and then they did this whole red carpet thing where we were gonna get our pictures taken, and they’ve got the crowd waiting behind us for us to go in. In retrospect they should have let the crowd in, got them drinking, and then taken the pictures of us on the red carpet; we had plenty of time. So we did that, and then we had to wait for maybe 45 minutes for the crowd to get liquored up and seated. There was just a lot of pacing around and looking for booze backstage, which, surprisingly in the beginning, there wasn’t any Chivas backstage. I eventually talked some stagehand into going and getting ice and a bottle. Colin Hanks and I, and [Michael] Gladis we kind of commandeered a backstage room and had a couple drinks before we went on. It just all kind of went and flowed and it was fun, and some of the people just blew me away with how good they were.

RKL: The reviews were great. And I would imagine that anytime you get a bunch of actors together, half of them sing and you never get to know it. So I thought it was such a great opportunity to sort of tease out that group talent that nobody would have known was there, from our [the viewer’s] perspective.

JM: And everybody was pretty good. The girls especially were phenomenal, and Mark Moses was great, and you’ve got Robert Morse and of course you’ve got the wild card Bryan Batt, who just killed. Bryan was just all day rehearsing with these girls dancing, and we were all Omigod, he isn’t gonna try and pull that off, is he? and he nailed it. They looked like they’d been doing it for months on the road together. Really knocked it out at that point. And then Colin Hanks came out with Dar Williams at the end and it was kind of the perfect ending. I had suggested that it be our out, and have the whole cast come out and sing the last verse with them and take the bow and be done. And we came, we saw we conquered. It went really good. And now they’re talking about Las Vegas the last week of January. And then I read in the trades that we’re going to London and Australia as well. We’ll believe that when we see it.

RKL: And a detour to New York!

JM: Yes, sorry, that was in the trades as well.

RKL: We can’t wait! So what else—have you got anything in the hopper?

JM: I just did a movie of the week with Angie Dickinson for Hallmark, and Laura Leighton. That was fun. Since the show ended I did a Criminal Minds and a Cold Case, so I’m just plugging away.

We then launched into a sidebar about the industry, the economy, our blog; its history and its future, how wonderful Matthew Weiner is, and the idea of Mad Men without Weiner.

JM: I’m a huge fan of the show, and I miss it when it’s not on and I want more, dammit!