**Seems like a lot of your scenes this season consisted of you yelling into a telephone. **

Yeah. Which is fun because when they’re shooting the other side, you get to come and just sit in the other office right outside the door. They don’t shoot the scenes at the same time, but everyone’s really good about being there for off-camera. My favorite was when they talk about Don pitching Burger Chef instead of Peggy, and I’m on the phone but you don’t know it until the very end. So I sat just off-camera, in my flip-flops, while they shot that whole scene.

Were you nervous when you first read the plane scene?

Well, it’s the second scene in the episode, so I was like, "Ummm...do I make it?" _[Laughs] _Someone asked me the other day if I peed myself when I read that, and I said, "I pee myself when I read every script, until I’m sure I’m not dead!" Especially as we get towards the end, you know? Ginsberg cuts off a nipple and goes to the hospital, and Bert Cooper dies—so every script you read is like, "Phew, I’m still here."

What was the breaking point for Ted before he decided to cut the engines?

He’s just done with those guys. It’s very similar to Ken Cosgrove dealing the guys from Chevy. It’s just like, "Look, these guys are douchebags and assholes, and this is not my job." Ted wants to be creative and he doesn’t want to deal with those people. That’s Pete’s job. And honestly, on those smaller planes, you can easily turn off the engine and start it back up. It’s actually not a big deal. It’s just, for someone who’s not flying—personally, it would scare the crap out of me. But for a really good pilot, it’s not actually a big deal. So it’s just to put them in their place and to shut them up.

Is it challenging to do a scene like that with your eyes hidden behind sunglasses?

I loved that my eyes were hidden in that scene. There was a lot of eye rolling that you don’t see, which would have given away more. Because you can’t see my eyes, you don’t know if he _is _trying to kill himself, and they’re collateral damage, or if he’s just messing with them.

Was that the same plane set from last season?

I’m pretty sure it’s the same plane. It’s not a set, you know: They put up a green screen and they pull that little plane onto a stage, and they have guys pulling on the wings to make it bounce. And it’s a small plane. When we shot the scene two seasons ago with Don and I in the plane—you know, I’m not a huge guy, I’m kind of a small guy, but Jon’s pretty big. With the two of us, it was packed. And the guy next to me in this scene was bigger than Jon, and then they had a guy in the back—which, we thought, "There’s no way we’re all gonna fit in that thing." They turn on all the lights, and it gets hot, and then you have to yell as if it’s really loud in there, and these guys are being deliberately douchey—so the frustration was not acting, I’ll put it that way.

I love that after the orange juice account nearly drove Ted to suicide, he was sitting in his office drinking—

Yeah, he was drinking a screwdriver! _[Laughs] _And by the way, this is the guy who doesn’t drink, really. He’s not the big drinker, which we saw last year.