The John Slattery Story, Edited by John Slattery Himself (2024)

The John Slattery Story, Edited by John Slattery Himself (1)

We see John Slattery, and he smells of smoke. He spent the earlier half of this bitter February afternoon standing on a rooftop in Brooklyn, modeling spring wear for the United Kingdom edition of this magazine, in which his face will fit well among the paragons of what you and I want to look like. His plume of white hair—which makes him appear both aged [1] and ageless—waves gently in the breeze as the Manhattan skyline furnishes the distance. Below, a document warehouse smolders, the smoke carried by the wind. The scent clasps onto him [2]. The chill, too. Or, to cut into the masturbatory scene craft, as he does so well: "I've been freezing my balls off." [MY MOTHER WON'T APPRECIATE THAT.]

There's some slack in his posture, making it obvious why Mad Men showrunner Matthew Weiner has told him to stand straighter in order to portray cutting '60s ad executive and superlative son of a bitch Roger Sterling. It feels strange to hear humility coming from the mouth that said "When God closes a door, he opens a dress." But when I prod him about finding himself positioned for comparison with both Jon Hamm, who took the Mad Men role he wanted before he had a chance to audition [3] for it, and George Clooney, ex-husband of his wife, Talia Balsam, he says: "I should feel worse, shouldn't I? I have a fairly—and I say fairly not because I'm without vanity—realistic image of myself compared with guys who look like that."

As a native Bostonian and the middle of six children [ELLEN, NAN, JULIE, LEE, ME, PETE (LOSER)], Slattery seems to enjoy jumping in and cracking wise more than answering questions about other actors—especially to tell a story about how cracking wise got someone hit, which happened often in the Catholic school both he and his father attended. "I saw some kid get slapped [4] in the face. The priest said, 'Does anyone know how this saint died?' It was the patron saint [ST. JOSEPH!] of this priest's family. And the kid said, 'Yeah—syphilis.' The priest just slapped this kid so hard his glasses went flying across the room. You never knew what was going to happen. I saw a kid get pushed [TOSSED, MORE LIKE] down the stairs. He had a broken leg. French teacher."

After graduating from the Catholic University of America in 1984, Slattery drove his father's Chevy Malibu station wagon through the snow to an apartment in Gravesend, Brooklyn. He remembers running his TV up the stairs to watch his Pats ("I think Deflategate is a load of horseshit—the Patriots could have won that game playing with a Wiffle ball") beat the Dolphins in the famous Snowplow Game [5]. He quit his day job "schlepping papers around town" for a law firm after he got a Levi's commercial that could pay the rent. "I think everybody at that point wanted you to be Tom Hanks," he says. "He was this funny, young, comedic-leaning man who had dark, curly hair, and I was a young guy who was neither of those other things but had dark, curly hair." So is it Hanks he feels competition with, then—not Hamm or Clooney? "I have met Tom Hanks. Several times. And he's been very nice." Would he be honest if Tom Hanks wasn't nice? "If Tom Hanks was a douchebag? [6] Are you kidding me? I'd tell everybody." Baby-faced Tom Hanks . . . "Goddamn Tom Hanks. Thinks he's so special. . . ."

The John Slattery Story, Edited by John Slattery Himself (3)

At some point in all this, Slattery moved to Manhattan. He still lives there now, with his wife and their 15-year-old son, who DJs for Slattery's friends' parties. Which brings us to Notorious B.I.G. "I could listen to that guy all day. Great lyrics. There's something about him. Some of those slower songs of his—" He stops himself. "I don't want to say any more about it. I sound like an even older white guy." This, his old-white-guy-ness [7], seems to be what he's most self-conscious about. He's perennially played the type—on Sex and the City , he played a politician who fetishized getting pissed on—since his 20s, when his hair grayed and then whitened. He's 52 now, about a decade younger than Roger Sterling. He calls the "silver fox" compliment "a silly way to be known" and used to go to a salon for dyeing, but believes artificial coloring looks strange in anything but a set's artificial light. "You have good hair," he says to me. "We just had a little moment. I had an omelet, and then I told you you had nice hair in this very intimate, sophisticated, metro moment." [8]

The John Slattery Story, Edited by John Slattery Himself (4)

Left to right: Sex and the City, Mad Men, God\'s Pocket.

We toast our second beers, and I tell him how much I enjoyed his directorial film debut, the dead-black comedy God's Pocket, which he coadapted from the namesake book by Pete Dexter. He has fond memories from filming—of his mother-in-law nailing a shoot-out scene in one take, of shooting the opening sex scene between Philip Seymour Hoffman and his Mad Men costar Christina Hendricks. "It was just a queen-size bed with those little brass legs and those little white wheels. The bed was wedged in place, but they were so fiercely doing their thing that the bed moved across the floor and right out of frame," he says. "The power of those two." That the film's domestic gross was less than the median price of a home in Missoula seems to frustrate him [9]—a mood he hasn't shown, not even during the hair inquiries. But he and Hoffman laughed together as they watched the premiere at Sundance last year. Hoffman told Slattery that it was the first movie of his that he'd sat through in a decade.

From the window, Slattery spots the car he had scheduled to arrive at the exact time our interview was scheduled to end. We say goodbye and shake hands. Then he walks—cuffs unbuttoned, balls presumably thawed—back into the chill. [10]

The John Slattery Story, Edited by John Slattery Himself (5)

Published in the May 2015 issue.

The John Slattery Story, Edited by John Slattery Himself (2024)
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