Bryan Batt plays Salvatore Romano, an art director who hides his homosexuality behind a heterosexual marriage. Here he discusses playing it straight among the boys of Sterling Cooper.

Q: As an openly gay man, how do you view Salvatore being in the closet during the '60s?

A: It's exactly what would happen. People stop me on the street and ask me when is Salvatore going to come out, and my response is, "To what?" There was no real gay community back then. There's been so many great strides made in just a short amount of time to have a vocal gay community. It's very interesting to see so much press about openly gay actors. I always just consider myself an actor. That's first. But as a gay man it's very interesting to play this character because people forget what people had to go through at that time.

Q: How about the tensions between Sal and Kitty (his wife) and Ken (his co-worker) in "The Gold Violin"?

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Phil Abraham started out as Mad Men's Director of Photography (and won an Emmy last month for outstanding cinematography for the pilot). Now he's one of the show's directors.

Q: We've learned a lot about Duck Phillips in the two episodes you directed this season. Are there any challenges to telling his story?

A: It's nice to be in a position with scripts where we learn more about a character, as opposed to just alluding to who this guy is. Here we scratch deeper than the surface with Duck, and you feel like you're working with a cleaner slate, which is fun. Obviously, as clean a slate as you have, you're still working off a script, but there's room for creating the character in a fresh way. And you want to get it right: You want to feel like you're serving the material well, and you're also dealing with a performance that really is new in terms of what it's revealing. When you have John Slattery or Jon Hamm, their characters are pretty well-established so you know exactly where you're going to go. But with a character like Duck, you're really discovering all this stuff for the first time and peering in on his inner demons, so you do have a little bit more of a responsibility to make sure you're getting the tone of that correct.

Q: What was it like working with Chauncey the dog in "Maidenform"?

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John Slattery talks about the Emmys and what it's like to break up with his real-life wife on the small screen.

Q: Congratulations on the Emmys.

A: Thanks a lot. Yeah, it was good. It was looking grim there for a couple of minutes. But [Best Supporting Actor winner] Zeljko Ivanek is a pal of mine, and he's really a great actor, so I was glad for him. Not as glad for him as I was sad for myself, but almost.

Q: Was there a lot of partying after the Emmys?

A: Uh, yeah. I had to get the hell out of Los Angeles just so I could save my liver. It was either New York or the Betty Ford clinic -- I flipped a coin and ended up at home.

Q: Can you relate to Roger's devil-may-care lifestyle?

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