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Spoilers (3)
In 2008, this series and Damages became the first basic-cable shows nominated in the best drama series category at the Emmys.
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Glen, the neighbor's young son who forms a connection with Betty, is portrayed by Marten Holden Weiner, the son of series creator Matthew Weiner.
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Both actors portraying the principal partners at the Sterling and Cooper advertising agency - John Slattery (Roger Sterling) and Robert Morse (Bertram Cooper) hail from Newton Massachusetts.
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The monolithic facade of Sterling Cooper's building is the same used for the UBS tower in Network
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Sally's teacher is first introduced on the show dancing around a maypole with her students. The teacher character is named Suzanne Farrell, after one of the most famous American ballerinas of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s.
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John Slattery auditioned for the role of Don Draper before being asked to play Roger Sterling.
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As of the start of the fifth season, the role of Robert "Bobby" Draper has been played by four different child actors. Bobby was originally played by Maxwell Huckabee; Huckabee was replaced with Aaron Hart toward the end of the first season; Hart was replaced with Jared Gilmore by the start of the third season; and Gilmore was replaced with Mason Vale Cotton starting with season five. It is particularly notable that Hart was replaced since he is the youngest actor ever to win a SAG Award (which he won for playing Bobby Draper).
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In 2012, costume designer Janie Bryant told "Slate" that she always repeats one of Peggy's costumes from the previous season during the next season's premiere. Bryant said that she "[loves] that tradition for Peggy because I think that this all is really based in reality. That's what we would do in real life: We repeat our clothes."
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According to January Jones, she had some doubts about taking the role because she hadn't had much to do on the first episodes, but she decided to trust her instincts on Betty having rich plots coming up.
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The actors do not smoke real cigarettes, they smoke Ecstacy herbal cigarettes which are tobacco and nicotine free. Show creator Matthew Weiner said in a New York Times article "You don't want actors smoking real cigarettes," he said. "They get agitated and nervous. I've been on sets where people throw up, they've smoked so much.". When asked what it's like to smoke herbal cigarettes, Jon Hamm (who plays Don Draper) told Vulture, "Terrible. They taste like a mixture between pot and soap."
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Mad Men counts Barack Obama among its fans. Obama sent a fan letter to Matthew Weiner following Season 3, telling him how much he enjoys the show. A stunned and flattered Weiner keeps the letter from Obama in a frame on the wall outside of his office.
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Matthew Weiner wrote the pilot of Mad Men in 1999 while working on the Ted Danson sitcom Becker. In 2002, Weiner sent the pilot as a writing sample to David Chase, who created The Sopranos.
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January Jones and Christina Hendricks both made their acting debut in the same work, the television film Sorority, eight years before being reunited on the show.
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January Jones originally auditioned (twice) for the role of Peggy Olson before Matthew Weiner asked her to read for the part of Betty Draper instead, despite the fact that at that point the character was barely in the pilot and he had no plans of fleshing her out.
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About a year elapsed between the filming of the pilot, Mad Men: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and the second episode, Mad Men: Ladies Room.
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According to Jon Hamm, the production's pursuit of historical accuracy is such, that series researchers will insist on knowing weather conditions, news items, popular culture for a particular period related to the script's time frame.
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Character Ken Cosgrove was likely based in part on the novelist/poet James Dickey, who worked in advertising in the 1960s while publishing poems in The New Yorker and other prominent magazines.
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During a 2013 interview in the New York Times Magazine, the interviewer, Andrew Goldman, asked Elisabeth Moss (who plays Peggy) if she though the Don-Peggy relationship would "ever be consummated, given the obvious sexual tension between them?" Moss's reply was, "I hope not. Anyone who sleeps with Don does not have a long road ahead of them. It's like the kiss of death to sleep with Don. I really think it would be jumping the shark to do that."
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At a 2013 Q&A session at the Paley Center for Media, Matthew Weiner said that he had already told his wife and a few writers about how he plans to end the whole series. He also said that "he's been told it's a disaster, but he's going with it [anyway]."
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_Julia Ormond_ who plays Megan Draper's French mother, is actually British, born in Surrey and went to a British private school.
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Spoilers
In 2008, show creator Matt Weiner told The Chicago Tribune that Peggy and Pete's son was given up for adoption (as she told Pete) and is not being raised by Peggy's sister or mother. Weiner also said that the misdirection to make the audience think that the son is being raised by Peggy's sister was deliberate. In 2013, Weiner expanded on this at a Q&A session at the Paley Center for Media. Weiner said that Pete and Peggy's child is "gone into the Catholic church's adoption system... it's untraceable, you can't find your birth parents. I guess you could now, but it's pretty hard."
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Clips from and references to the movie and the song Bye Bye Birdie pervade much of the third season. It had already been established in previous seasons that Don's affectionate pet name for Betty is "Birdy;" since the third season ends with Betty flying to Reno to divorce Don, the prominence of the song is the showrunner's nod to the fact that the third season is the one in which Don must literally say "bye bye" to his wife, "Birdy."
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During the show's first season, an elaborate, multi-stage makeup and costuming process was developed by costume designer Katherine Jane Bryant and makeup department head Debbie Zoller for actress Elisabeth Moss to simulate Peggy's weight gain. Bryant created several body suits with different levels of padding for Moss to wear under her costumes. Zoller made four stages of facial prosthetics, starting with a fairly subtle piece to augment Moss's chin and neck, and then added increasing cheek pieces to create the illusion that she was slowly becoming significantly heavier. During the filming of the fifth season, the makeup artists repeated the process--this time for January Jones, the actress who plays Betty (Draper) Francis. Although the storyline in which Betty gained a great deal of weight was initially contrived in anticipation of having to explain Jones's pregnancy, Jones didn't gain anything close to the amount of weight that the showrunners intended for Betty to gain, so the makeup artists dressed Jones in a fat suit and covered her face and neck in prosthetic makeup appliances to simulate Betty's weight gain. They also employed a larger body double to film a scene in which heavier Betty gets out of the bath.
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