Characters / Mad Men Sterling Cooper

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The secondary cast of Sterling Cooper (Seasons 1-3) in Mad Men. Beware of spoilers.

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Paul Kinsey

Played By: Michael Gladis

A wannabe Bohemian copywriter. He doesn't transfer to SCDP with the rest of the cast.

• '50s Hair: Starts off with a groomed look of the era, adds a goatee, and then ends up with no hair due to joining the Hare Krishnas.
• Bourgeois Bohemian: Grows a beard to put on the facade that he's "with it" among the righteous youth.
• Butt-Monkey: More and more as Peggy rises through the ranks.
• Celebrity Resemblance: He indicates in Season 1 that Joan used to mock him for looking like Orson Welles. Come Season 2, he's embraced the resemblance somewhat, with the help of his new beard.
• The Chew Toy: Is the butt of a lot of demeaning jokes. Even Lois, one of the more incompetent employees, tells him he's likely not going to get rehired post-merger due to redundancy.
• Deadpan Snarker: He has no problem making fun of things that annoy him.
• Giftedly Bad: Fancies himself a talented writer. The show is constantly providing evidence to the contrary.
  • Compared to Peggy, his work as a copywriter is mediocre at best. Some episodes indicate that he has good ideas, but no follow-through.
  • His coworkers discover a play he has written and act it out. No one is impressed.
  • His return, after being Put on a Bus, reveals that he has been fired from a number of copywriter jobs at other agencies.
  • He presents Harry with a spec script he has written for a Star Trek episode. He is very proud of his work, calling it the best thing he has ever written. Harry, Peggy, and even Paul's girlfriend agree that it's terrible.
  Harry: I think it was really hard for him.
  Peggy: Then he shouldn't be doing it.
• Green-Eyed Monster: He's jealous of Peggy's success (not that he does anything about it).
• Hidden Depths: Was a talented a capella singer at Princeton, and sung in their choir. He also reveals in "The Christmas Waltz" that he's more sensitive than he appears and is really just desperate for approval and acceptance wherever he can get it.
• Hipster: Of the period's definition of the word, although to be frank he'd fit right in with today's hipsters, too.
• Humiliation Conga: After he is not invited to join SCDP, he works for McCann Erickson but is fired. He then goes through a series of jobs at other agencies until he is reduced to work as an in-house copywriter for A&P. Then he loses that job as well.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: His huge ego and pompous demeanor are often shown to be a cover for his deep insecurities borne from his working-class background and beneath it all, is just desperate for some respect and acceptance.
• Joisey: He apparently had a really thick accent before he went to Princeton. He still lives in New Jersey through the early seasons (Season 2 opens at a party at his apartment in Montclair).
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: He's very pretentious and arrogant, though it's repeatedly made clear that he's something of a dunce and everyone eventually comes to see that Peggy and Smitty are more talented copywriters.
• Morality Pet: In "Christmas Waltz", he becomes Harry's.
• Most Writers Are Writers: He tries, anyway.
• Old Shame: It's revealed that he went to Princeton on a scholarship in season 3, implying he's from lower-class roots and he doesn't want anyone else to know.
• Pride: His inflated, sensitive ego makes him hard to get along with and contributes to his Butt-Monkey status, but the really fatal example of this can be inferred from offscreen. When Crane asks Peggy why Kinsey was never brought on at SCDP, she responds that he never applied, suggesting that his pride was too bruised to consider that they might have given him a second shot. Contrast to Cosgrove, who was also left behind initially but made his way back to SCDP in short order.
• Put on a Bus: He isn't hired by SCDP and thus leaves the cast after Season 3.
  • The Bus Came Back: After being absent for the entirety of Season 4, he shows up once more in Season 5's "Christmas Waltz," where it is revealed that he has joined the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. At the end of that episode, he is put more literally and permanently on a bus, to Hollywood by Harry Crane.
• Shock Value Relationship: He dates a black woman to show how "progressive" he is. It doesn't take her long to figure it out.
• Small Name, Big Ego: A fairly frail ego at that.
• Soapbox Sadie: Against the destruction of Penn Station.
• Some of My Best Friends Are X: In an attempt to show how progressive he is to his black girlfriend, Paul pretends he's on a first name basis with the African American elevator attendant.
• The Unfavorite: Has very clearly become this compared to Peggy by mid-late Season 3, with Don considering him a spent force creatively and being thoroughly sick of his politics. Harry even admits privately to Pete in Season 5 that even if the McCann-Erickson buyout hadn't gone ahead, then sooner or later Don would probably have fired him anyway.

Sal Romano

Played By: Bryan Batt

Head art director at Sterling Cooper, and a closeted gay man. He leaves just before the end of Season 3 for reasons that have to do with Sterling Cooper's main client being a huge dick.

• '50s Hair: Has a stylized, but slick and masculine look from that era.
• Armored Closet Gay: Sal's entire Latin Lover, ladies man persona is put on to cover up the fact that he's gay. When approached by a client who can recognize him for who he is because he too is a Closet Gay, Sal shuts down the entire proposition saying he simply can't.
• The Beard: He's gay but marries Kitty between Seasons 1 and 2. Unfortunately, she is not aware that this is her role until months after they are married, and is quite hurt at the realization. She thought they had a legitimate Childhood Friend Romance.
• But Not Too Gay: Justified given the time period, and the fact that Sal is extremely careful and conscientious. He's had his opportunities, but has turned (most of) them down.
• Camp Gay: A downplayed variant, but compared to the toxic masculinity of the other men in the office, the gay Sal stands out as being a bit more feminine. The downplayed part is at least partially due to him staying in the closet. There's one time he goes full camp when running his Bye Bye Birdie commercial through to his wife Kitty which causes her to realize his sexuality.
• Deadpan Snarker: Starts off this way. The majority of his contributions in Season 1 are snarky.
• Despair Event Horizon: Lee Garner Jr., SC's largest client, tries to sexually extort him. When he refuses, and Garner demands Roger fire him, which he does, and Don refuses to come to his aid and makes a pointedly homophobic jab. Sal, jobless, calls his wife in despair, lies to her that everything is fine, then goes to drown his sorrows with anonymous sex in Central Park.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: In a rare case of it, he's not killed off, but once Sal is outed, he gets sent his walking papers, and was never seen or mentioned again.
• Gayngst: Justified, given the period setting.
• Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today?: In his early appearances especially, he is frequently loudly asserting his womanizing ways and attractiveness to women in a manner that, to modern audiences, comes off as more than a little suspect and unconvincing. It mostly sails right over the heads of the other characters however. It helps that he's less transparent about it than Harry.
• Intergenerational Friendship: He's in his 40s, but tends to socialize mainly with his mid-20s colleagues, and tends to emulate their behavior, at least vocally. It's implied that his is part of his attempts to keep up appearances regarding his orientation.
• Latin Lover: He plays this trope for maximum cover, with his WASPy colleagues likely seeing this as an explanation for his slight flamboyance. His Italian heritage makes him automatically attractive to at least one doe-eyed secretary that we know of. He's also in the process of becoming a Silver Fox, with grey at his temples.
• Nice Guy: Develops into this. Although not without his sneakiness, Sal is one of the better natured men at Sterling Cooper, often showing a friendly, charming side. However, he often feels forced to play the jerkass womanizer to fit in.
• Put on a Bus: In Season 3, when he's fired by SC.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Infamously never appeared again after the third season, although according to Word of God he was originally supposed to.

Herman "Duck" Phillips

Played By: Mark Moses

Brought into Sterling Cooper after his Dark and Troubled Past at the London office of Young & Rubicam^note A real firm, by the way.. His decisions result in frequent clashes with others (especially Don), but he gets the job done. Gets a job with agency Grey^note Also real. after PPL sells Sterling Cooper to McCann Erickson^note Real again. How did you guess?. He eventually becomes a headhunter that many of SC&P's staff use.

• '50s Hair: Has the Standard '50s Father look, then close cuts his hair, and then ends the series with slightly looser hair.
• The Alcoholic: He starts the series newly sober, and tries to stay that way. But he doesn't stay that way.
• Appropriated Appelation: Implied:
  Duck: Please, call me "Duck".
  Don: I was told not to call you "Duck".
• Big Bad: He, more or less, serves as this in season 2, becoming Don's Arch-Enemy within Sterling Cooper. Most of the drama stems from their inability to agree on how to run the agency, working instead to outsmart and undermine each other.
• Broken Ace: He's a very good salesman and quite charming, both of which make him a good Account Man. But his alcoholism and ego both end up ruining his career. He bounces back by pivoting to being a successful Headhunter, but his reputation makes this an uphill battle.
• Dark and Troubled Past: His career at Y&R was ruined by his alcoholism and an affair.
  • He also killed seventeen men at Okinawa.
• I Know Kung Fu: He can handle himself in a fight due to having served in the Marine Corps, as Don learns in "The Suitcase".
• Jerkass: Probably the most ruthless in office politics while at Sterling Cooper, though he tries to camouflage it with a fatherly demeanor. It doesn't fool anybody.
• Kick the Dog: When he forces his dog Chauncey onto the streets of New York because he's bothered by it looking at him while drinking. After the conversation with Pete earlier in the episode (where Pete says he loves having Chauncey around and wants a dog "for the office"), it's clearly done to show that Duck is not a nice person.
• May–December Romance: With the decade or so younger Peggy.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: He persuades Sterling Cooper to get rid of their existing regional airline client in order to bring in American Airlines, which backfires horribly when his contact at the airline is fired right before the scheduled pitch, killing the deal there and then. Roger calls him out on this when he requests to be made partner, pointing out that thanks to the mess, the company is actually worse off than they were when he was brought in.
• Off the Wagon: As we later discover. He's barely functional by Season 4. Come Season 6 he has it a bit more under control, but is clearly not sober.
• Out-Gambitted: When he becomes president of the agency (really acting as a proxy for the British firm PPL) he thinks he'll be able to quash his rivalry with Don by making him adhere to the terms of his contract. Unfortunately, it turns out Don has never had a contract, and threatens to walk if Duck stays in charge. Cue Villainous Breakdown from Duck. Dismayed at Duck's lack of professionalism, and nervous about losing their top adman, the PPL heads quickly change their mind about Duck's presidency.
• Semper Fi: He was in the Marine Corps as a young man.
• Smoking Hot Sex: Of its many practitioners on the series, none is quite as avid as Duck, particularly during his affair with Peggy.
• Smug Snake: He's not nearly as good at office politics as he thinks, as Don effortlessly spoils his attempt to use the PPL merger to make himself company president.
• Standard '50s Father: Divorced though he may be, this is clearly an image he's cultivated for himself.
• Start of Darkness: While he was never that nice of a person, he was at least no worse than Don, Roger or Bert were. The combination of his attempted deal with American Airlines being sunk by misfortune, along with his wife cutting off access to his children sends him down a dark path, and he goes From Bad to Worse after Roger scornfully turns down his request to be made a partner in the company.
• Tyrant Takes the Helm: For all of a couple of minutes.
• Villainous Breakdown: Gradually becomes more stressed out over his time at Sterling Cooper. It gets even worse when he falls off the wagon. This culminates in his ragequitting Sterling Cooper after Don effortlessly foils his plan to use the merger to become company president. It reaches its climax in Season 4, when he drunkenly disrupts the Clio award ceremony, then breaks into the SCDP office to take a crap on Don's chair (where Peggy finds him after he almost does it in Roger's office by mistake). He seems to have got his act together again by Season 6's "The Better Half".
• We Used to Be Friends: "Friends" is stretching it a bit, but he and Don were initially on much better terms. After all, it was Don who hired Duck in the first place, and the first client they land together is one of the most triumphant pieces of creative of the series.

Freddy Rumsen

"Do the work, Don."

Played By: Joel Murray

An avuncular copywriter who, despite being a little old and behind the times, is generally open and fun-loving. He's a big supporter of Peggy, though they have their disagreements. Has had problems with alcohol, but is presently on the up-and-up.

• The Alcoholic: Joan in Season One makes a snarky remark about his drinking habits after he expresses amazement at Peggy's wordplay ("Wouldn't you like to put that in a drink") and Season Two shows that his drinking led to him performing Mozart by unzipping his fly out in the steno pool and passing out and peeing his pants just before a big meeting. This leads to him getting fired and becoming freelance. He manages to overcome it eventually. It is because of his experience with this that he comes back in Season 7 to help out Don who calls him when he falls off the wagon and nearly blows his second chance of returning to the company. Giving Don a pep talk and encouragement to pull himself back together.
• The Bus Came Back: In Seasons 4, 5, and 7A.
• Character Development: He becomes considerably less sexist and more serious as the show goes on. After hitting rock bottom after being forced out of Sterling Cooper, he starts attending AA meetings regularly and sobers up. He stays this way, and tries to help Don get sober. After returning to work for SCDP, he takes Peggy's honest criticism of his dated ideas to heart, and makes a genuine effort to update his views.
• Chew Toy: In early seasons he pretty much exists to be the butt of Roger's (and the whole office's, to a lesser extent) jokes.
• Get A Hold Of Yourself Man: The verbal kind. After rescuing a blackout drunk Don from getting fired, he dries him out and gives him an equal parts "The Reason You Suck" Speech and a Dare to Be Badass monologue. This actually manages to snap some sense into Don, and inspires him to pull himself together enough to actually work. However, sadly it fails to get Don to treat his alcoholism.
• Intergenerational Friendship: Has one with Peggy. He isn't expressly portrayed as a stand-in father figure, but his Affectionate Nickname for her, Ballerina, is quite fatherly. He does however serve as a mentor to her, and is both the first person in the office to recognize her potential AND advocate for her.
• Playing Cyrano: In the Season 7 premiere, we find out that during his "leave of absence", Don gets Freddy to go into SC&P as a front to give pitches Don wrote so he can still work. Freddy lampshades this to Don later by calling it "this Cyrano routine".
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Implied, and potentially a major contributing factor to his alcoholism. He served in the European theatre in WW2, and Roger makes reference to his time in the service revolving around Freddy being in charge of "killing Germans", and him having personally killed at least 15 people. Any time this is brought up, he attempts to dodge the subject, and takes no pride in his war record.
• Token Good Teammate: Of the older and more conservative men in Sterling Cooper. He is faithfully married to his wife and is more involved with his family (in contrast to the likes of Roger, Don, Pete and Harry). Unlike most of his male colleagues, he doesn't try to grope the women in the office (contrast Ken's crude move on Peggy in "Ladies' Room" with Freddy chastely dancing with her in "The Hobo Code"). During the focus group test for Belle Jolie lipstick, he doesn't make degrading remarks about the secretarial pool, instead becoming the first to notice Peggy's talent for words. As well as returning to help Don in his hour of need without any hesitation.

Allison

Played By: Alexa Alemanni

Don's most competent secretary since Peggy moved to Creative. Works for him at Sterling Cooper and later joins him at SCDP. Things go downhill after one-night stand that clearly meant more to her than it did to Don, and she quits after breaking down in tears in a focus group.

• Beware the Nice Ones: After being a quiet, friendly and good-natured secretary for four seasons, she throws a paperweight at Don and calls him out when he makes it clear that their sexual encounter was a one-off.
• It Meant Something to Me: Allison had feelings for Don long before their Christmas hook-up, and is upset by him treating it as a one-off.
• Only One Name: We never find out her surname.
• Put on a Bus: After quitting and venting her frustration at Don, she walks straight out of SCDP and into a job at a women's magazine.
• Rage Breaking Point: Hits hers after Don makes it very clear that he wants to act as though nothing happened between them, in addition to which he can't be bothered to write her a letter of recommendation, asking her to do it herself.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Allison puts it plain to Don.
  I don't usually say this, but you're not a good person!
• Ship Tease: In early episodes, she's shown flirting with Ken.

Lois Sadler

Played By: Crista Flanagan

One of the least able of Sterling Cooper's secretaries. Best known for being the one who ran over the British guy's foot with a lawnmower.

• The Ditz: She's incompetent and unprofessional, although it's usually played for laughs. When she's Don's secretary, she doesn't even try to cover for him when he's done a disappearing act; it's not long before she gets sent back to the switchboard.
• Drives Like Crazy: On a sit-on John Deere lawnmower, no less.
• Gossipy Hens: Uses her position as a switchboard operator to provide confidential information for Paul, Harry and Ken.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Says this word-for-word after the lawnmower incident.
• Sigh of Love: Does this in the presence of Sal, for whom she develops a crush after eavesdropping on his conversation with his mother on the phone.
• Ultimate Job Security: You would think that getting drunk and running over the new boss's foot with a lawnmower would result in instant dismissal. Not Lois, who is shown to be still working at Sterling Cooper several episodes later.

Smith and Smith

Played By: Patrick Cavanaugh and Edin Gali

"Smitty" Smith and Kurt Smith are a young copywriter/art director team hired by Don in Season 2 to help with appeal to the youth market. Smitty is American and often has to explain aspects of American culture to Kurt, who is German. Neither of them is asked to join SCDP at the end of Season 3.

• The Bus Came Back: In Season 4, Smitty is shown working at CGC, the implication being that Kurt's there too.
• Have I Mentioned I Am Gay?: Kurt has no problem with telling everyone he is gay, although we never see him in a relationship with a man. Smitty's sexual orientation is left unsaid, although Duck refers to the pair of them as "homos". Also, their physical closeness during their initial interview hints that there may be something between them.
• Important Haircut: Kurt provides this for Peggy by cutting off her ponytail in "The Jet Set".
• No Name Given: Smitty's actual first name is never revealed.
• Those Two Guys: They're almost always shown together.

John Hooker

Played By: Ryan Cartwright

Lane's officious, self-important assistant.

• The Friend Nobody Likes: Even Lane can't stand him.
• Ironic Nickname: Everyone at the office calls him "Moneypenny".
• Put on a Bus: Along with all of the other Sterling Cooper employees who are left behind when Don, Roger, Bert, Lane, Peggy, Joan, Pete and Harry depart to form SCDP, with him being the one who has to deal with the irate PPL executives in London.
• Separated by a Common Language: He's a Brit who tries, with not much success, to convince his American colleagues that his official title of "secretary" in no way implies that he's on the same level as the other secretaries.
  I'm Mr. Pryce's right arm; I'm not his typist.
• You Are in Command Now: After nearly all of the senior staff leave to form SCDP, Hooker is left in charge of the gutted remains of the agency for the few weeks until it gets absorbed by McCann Erickson.

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