When John Slattery began playing the dashing and witty Roger Sterling on Mad Men, he had no idea that he was signing on to become Roger Sterling, quite literally. The man can’t get away from the character.
Whether it’s in his smooth narration of Lincoln car commercials or in his latest film, The Adjustment Bureau — in which he appears in a getup strikingly similar to that of the 1960s ad executive — Slattery and Sterling are more and more becoming one and the same.
“I know. I say I have to be careful and it doesn’t seem like I’m being careful,” Slattery confesses, admitting that by taking jobs like the Lincoln gig and the role on Bureau, he might be pigeonholing himself. But the role in The Adjustment Bureau — playing an employee of the mysterious Bureau, which tries to keep the world on its proper course — was too good to turn down.
“I’m sure it will be like, ‘He’s doing just another version of Roger Sterling,’ but that’s OK,” he says. “It’s an interesting idea and I liked the people that were going to be in it, I liked the script and the character.”
Meanwhile, Sterling — er, Slattery — is gearing up for the fifth season of Mad Men, though at press time no contracts had been signed, and typically this is the time of year when scripts are being composed. But Slattery isn’t worried.
“Everyone’s optimistic that it’s coming back, but deals haven’t been worked out somewhere upstairs and so no one knows anything,” he says. “I mean, maybe [creator Matt Weiner] has ideas, but I was just with him for a week and he hasn’t said a thing to me.”
