List of Mad Men characters
This is a list of fictional characters in the television series Mad Men, all of whom have appeared in multiple episodes.
Overview
Main characters
! colspan="10" style="background: LightSteelBlue;" |Recurring characters
Primary characters
Don Draper
Donald "Don" Draper born in 1926, is the creative director at Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency; he eventually rises to become a partner. He later becomes a founding partner at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. Draper is the series' protagonist, and more storylines focus on him than on other characters.Peggy Olson
Margaret "Peggy" Olson, upon introduction, is the ostensibly naïve "new girl" at Sterling Cooper. She was originally Draper's secretary, but showed surprising talent and initiative, including a knack for understanding the consumer's mind. Don promotes her to copywriter, and she eventually accepts a copy chief position with Ted Chaough's firm, CGC, only to find herself once again working for Don following a merger. Peggy's first campaign is for Belle Jolie lipstick; she is promoted to junior copywriter on the same day that she goes into labor. Peggy either hid or was in denial about her pregnancy; she gives birth to a boy conceived with Pete Campbell, with whom she had a couple of one night stands. After her return to Sterling Cooper, she continues to have success as a copy writer and eventually loses her little girl style, cuts her hair, and begins to dress more like an adult, but with subtle nods to her Catholic school girl upbringing.Pete Campbell
Peter "Pete" Campbell is an ambitious young account executive whose father-in-law controls the advertising for Clearasil, a Sterling Cooper account. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he becomes more competitive with Don as the series progresses, and ultimately becomes a partner of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.Betty (Draper) Francis
Elizabeth "Betty" Francis is the ex-wife of Don Draper and mother of their three children, Sally, Bobby, and Gene. Her family home was in Elkins Park, Pa., and she graduated from Bryn Mawr College. She speaks fluent Italian. She is the archetypal dissatisfied 1960s housewife, who dutifully turned her back on her education and professional career to become a homemaker. After obtaining a divorce from Don, she marries Henry Francis and moves to Rye in late 1965. Despite no longer being married to Don, Betty is shown to harbor feelings for him.Joan Harris
Joan P. Harris is first depicted as an office manager at Sterling Cooper, who acts as a professional and social mentor, as well as an occasional rival, to Peggy Olson, much as Don Draper is to Pete Campbell. Throughout the course of the series, Joan has a long-standing affair with Roger Sterling, which results in their conceiving a son. She ascribes the boy's fatherhood to her husband, a physician serving as a military officer in Vietnam, whom she later divorces. Joan eventually rises up to the level of partner at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce and the following SC&P, and chooses to create her own firm after SC&P is absorbed by McCann Erickson.Roger Sterling
Roger H. Sterling, Jr., is one of the two managing partners of Sterling Cooper, and later a founding partner at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. Roger's relationship with Lucky Strike, one of Sterling Cooper's most lucrative accounts, is key to the story from the outset.Supporting characters
Sal Romano
Salvatore "Sal" Romano is the Italian-American art director at Sterling Cooper, from Baltimore. Sal turned down a proposition from a male employee of Belle Jolie Cosmetics midway through the first season, admitting that though he has thought about having relationships with men, he has never acted on this impulse. He joins the other men of Sterling Cooper in flirting with the women in the workplace. He speaks to his mother in Italian. Sal is shown to have a sarcastic side to his personality, mocking Pete after he nearly loses his job and laughing at Freddy Rumsen urinating himself. Between Seasons 1 and 2, Sal marries a childhood friend, Kitty. The two entertain Ken Cosgrove for dinner during the Season 2 episode "The Gold Violin", during which Sal seems taken with his guest. Kitty shows signs of frustration at being ignored, expressing that something is wrong in their marriage.In the Season 3 premiere, Don Draper sees Sal alone with a partly dressed, male hotel bellhop, but subtly assures Sal he will keep silent by drawing Sal's attention to the ad slogan they had been working on for raincoats: "Limit your exposure". Later in the third season, with Don's encouragement, Sal branches out into directing commercials for the company. Meanwhile, Sal and Kitty have not had sex in several months and Kitty tells Sal she needs "tending to". He assures her that he loves her, but his mind is elsewhere due to pressures at work. Illustrations popular in magazine advertisements in the 1950s and early 1960s are going out of style in favor of photographs, so he fears he will lose his job as an illustrator. Later in the scene, Kitty is in bed and Sal vividly demonstrates how the Ann-Margret look-alike will dance and sing "Bye Bye Birdie" in his commercial, with lyrics changed for Pepsi's new diet drink Patio. Kitty nods but appears uncomfortable with Sal's flamboyant performance.
In the Season 3 episode "Wee Small Hours", Sal rejects the advances of Lee Garner, Jr., a married Lucky Strike executive who, in retaliation, calls [|Harry Crane] and demands Sal's removal from the account. When Harry fails to pass this on, Garner walks out of a subsequent meeting. Roger fires Sal on the spot. Don supports Roger's decision on the basis that the company can afford to lose him rather than Lucky Strike and regards Sal with disdain, implying that he should have just given Garner what he wanted. In Sal's last appearance, he calls his wife late at night from a payphone located in a park, a group of men nearby. He does not tell her he has been fired, only that he will be arriving home late.
Paul Kinsey
Paul Kinsey is a copywriter at Sterling Cooper. Kinsey initially features as part of the group of unmarried or childless young ad men in the Sterling Cooper office, who spend a lot of their time drinking, flirting, and gossiping. Paul tries out a lot of identities for himself throughout the series, never seeming to feel comfortable where he belongs. In addition to his creative duties at Sterling Cooper, Paul is a writer who considers advertising a temporary gig until his career takes off, and in the Season 1 episode "Nixon vs. Kennedy", his drunken co-workers find a play he wrote and act it out, although it is not very good, and it seems to ridicule a lot of his co-workers. Paul dated Joan prior to the beginning of the series, but Joan split up with him because he bragged about their relationship around the office; according to Joan, Paul "has a big mouth". When a then-naive Peggy begins to work at Sterling Cooper as Don's secretary, Paul hits on her, but Peggy rejects him, as she is secretly attracted to Pete. In Season 2, Paul dates Sheila, a black assistant manager in South Orange who is involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Joan initially makes fun of his relationship with his black girlfriend, as she believes he is seeing her only to appear interesting. At their first meeting, Joan microaggressively tells Sheila that she never "took Paul to be open-minded". Sheila dumps Paul while they are registering black voters in the South, after he whines and frets about his safety in the region over hers. He is "slumming" by living in a run-down neighborhood popular among beatniks in Montclair, New Jersey, and espouses more Bohemian ideas and attitudes than his fellow young copywriters. Joan, however, mocks him for this lifestyle, proclaiming that he is simply pretentious and wants to believe he is better than the people he works with. He steals an IBM Selectric typewriter from the Sterling Cooper offices because he says as a writer, he needs it. This leads to a secretary being blamed and almost fired. He is originally from New Jersey and attended Princeton on a scholarship, two facts he is eager to hide. A fan of science fiction and The Twilight Zone, he has a notably Kennedy-era fascination with space.As opposed to other characters who smoke cigarettes, Paul smokes a pipe, another thing Joan calls him out on as a means of appearing more cultured. Kinsey is a moderate drinker and says he likes to get high "whenever can".
In Season 2, Kinsey grows an Orson Welles beard and later quotes passages from Welles' War of the Worlds radio broadcast. He initially encourages Peggy to pursue copywriting, noting, "There are female copywriters", but it immediately becomes clear this is merely an attempt to seduce her. He later becomes jealous and pettily competitive when her skill becomes indisputable. He realizes Peggy and Don have creative "magic" together when it comes to advertising ideas and slogans and is annoyed, especially as his own contributions become less favored by Don and, as a result, diminish his importance at the firm. Paul expresses considerable anger when he realizes Peggy was chosen by Don to join the new agency Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, while he was not.
In the Season 5 episode "Christmas Waltz", Kinsey reappears as a devotee of the Hare Krishna movement, which he has joined at least partly to win the affections of a woman.. He contacts Harry Crane to ask him to pass on his spec script for Star Trek to Harry's contacts at NBC. The script is terrible, but Harry, feeling guilty because he has had sex with Paul's Hare Krishna girlfriend, and not wanting to deal with Paul's problems, praises the script and gives Paul $500 and a ticket to Los Angeles so he can start afresh. He advises Paul not to submit the script to the Star Trek production team due to "studio politics," and instead recommends that he write his own original stories. Paul expresses considerable gratitude toward Harry, telling him he is the first person to actually do something for him, completely unaware of Harry's lies.