Show’s creator marvels that ‘150 people kept the ending secret for a year’ and says anyone should be able to write female characters, regardless of gender

Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner says he feels like he’s “back to zero” since the final episode of his hit television show aired to audiences after seven seasons.

Speaking to a full house at the Sydney Town Hall as part of the 2015 Vivid festival, Weiner compared himself to Miss Havisham from Great Expectations, going from running a team of 450 to packing up the detritus of seven years on the show.

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“You do feel like you’re back to zero,” he said while acknowledging the “infusion of youthfulness” he feels now faced with an empty laptop. Fresh off the plane from New York, he admitted he doesn’t watch his own show on flights, but always checks “to see if other people are watching it”.

The final episode of the long-running drama about ad man Don Draper aired at the end of May but the show actually finished shooting in July 2014, with Weiner moving out of his office after post-production wrapped in October.

Mad Men was his “mistress”, said the writer, who spent years honing and unsuccessfully pitching his story while working on other people’s TV shows before the US cable network AMC finally picked it up and commissioned it.

“I would go to work every day and spend my evenings on my ‘advertising project’,” said Weiner, adding that he “lived off” his wife, architect Linda Brettler, for four-and-a-half years when they were first married.

“This was back when it was embarrassing to live off your wife ... I was the loser screenwriter husband. I would go to parties and people would ask ‘Have you written anything I’ve heard of?’ and I would say: ‘No’.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Matthew Weiner in conversation with Kate Mulvany in Sydney Photograph: Destination NSW

Relieved that he no longer has to keep Don Draper’s fate under wraps, Weiner marvelled that “150 people kept the ending a secret for a year”, recalling a similar nondisclosure agreement he signed while working for David Chase on The Sopranos: “I’m going to know this and no one else will – I enjoy that [feeling].”

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Pressed by his interviewer, the Australian actor and playwright, Kate Mulvany, about the roughly 50:50 male to female ratio of Man Men’s writing team, Weiner said: “I don’t care. It’s never been an interest of mine. I care [only if] I hire the best people.”

A lot of the things viewers like about Mad Men’s female characters were traits or scenes he had written himself, said Weiner.

“You may not be trained to assume that a female character should be as interesting as a male character and you may not be trained to give them a motivation or a life outside the scene, and that’s a flaw, but there’s no reason why anyone with an imagination shouldn’t be able to write for any other human being if they just think about it long enough.”

Part of Mad Men’s revisionist history, he said, was trying to explain to people that “being that housewife, married to that man, getting the house and the station wagon, was the best job in the world ... it was, for the era, a true mark of success”.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest One of Matthew Weiner’s most popular scenes.

Weiner also talked about the process of casting Mad Men’s key roles. Choosing known names would have been a “liability” he said; instead his focus was on finding accomplished character actors who could hold their own while also disappearing believably into the world of the show. The same went for guest stars.

“Being in a scene with Jon Hamm requires a certain amount of chemistry, no matter male or female, or he will blow you off screen,” said Weiner. “You will not be seen.”

Weiner expressed “zero tolerance” for the now common habit of casting British actors as Americans or Americans as Brits. “Don Draper’s big secret is not that he’s English,” he quipped.

“I want to be known as someone who had taste,” he added, citing his own TV heroes Lorne Michaels of Saturday Night Live and the Twin Peaks creator, David Lynch.

Before there was something calling trolling, there was something called dramatic tension Matthew Weiner

To fans accusing him of “trolling” them with particular details and storylines on Mad Men – such as Don’s second wife Megan wearing the same T-shirt as Sharon Tate, one of Charles Manson’s murder victims – Weiner responded: “Before there was something calling trolling, there was something called dramatic tension.”

Weiner did not reveal what he is working on next but expressed contentment at the reception of Mad Men’s finale.

“I never finished anything till I was 30 years old. So the idea that we went all the way to the end of the show, that they let us do it how and when we wanted, that I committed to the idea and executed it, it was a big feeling – mostly positive.”

He added: “I work with a bunch of perfectionists which means you only stop when you have to. You always feel you’re failing on some level.”