mad men

Mad Men’s Bryan Batt Has No Plans to Leave His TV Wife

It’s been five whole months now since we last heard from Don Draper and the staff of Sterling Cooper, so we’ve been desperate for any scraps of information on Mad Men’s upcoming third season. Luckily, we ran into Bryan Batt the other night at a reading of James Kirkwood’s Legends at Town Hall, and, though he doesn’t actually know what will happen yet (this year’s thirteen episodes won’t begin shooting until May, and won’t air till July), he was more than happy to speculate.

Will the closeted Salvatore Romano ever leave his wife? “No, I don’t think he’ll leave his wife for a while,” Batt told us. “I hope not — I love working with her! It’s an honest story line, and that’s what [closeted] men did. They stayed with their wives until their children were grown up and went away to college. We have great writers, so I trust them to write something realistic.”

But will he ever come out? “No, Sal won’t come out. There’s going to be more torture in his story,” he said. “There’s too much story left for him to come out. He’s in America, he’s younger, he’s Italian — Sal is embedded in his myth. And he has no one to come out to. Who would he come out to?” We don’t know — does he think anyone else on Mad Men is closeted? “No, I think they’re pretty clear about that,” he said.

Then, just because we figured he’d have a funny story, we asked Batt, a Broadway veteran, about his most embarrassing onstage moment. He did not disappoint: “When I was in The Scarlet Pimpernel, my pants ripped,” he recounted. “They split down the middle right onstage! I had to use a girl’s shawl to cover them up, and I had a sword fight to do. I almost broke into ‘America’ from West Side Story.”

Get more onstage mishaps by viewing our Party Lines slideshow.

Mad Men’s Bryan Batt Has No Plans to Leave His TV Wife