While Morbius actor Jared Harris is best known on television these days for playing Hari Seldon in the Apple TV subscription-exclusive Foundation, I still back fondly on when he played Lane Pryce on AMC’s Mad Men. Unfortunately, Lane had one of the most tragic exits of the show, as he died by suicide in his office towards the end of Season 5. However, there was a degree of comedy in the lead-up to this tragedy that actually made Harris fall off his chair laughing. Not only that, the actor agreed to make a big sacrifice in order to protect Lane’s fate from being leaked to the public.
The actor discussed his Mad Men experience while appearing on Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum. After mentioning how show creator Matthew Weiner met with him privately to inform him that Lane Pryce was being killed off, even offering him “really good expensive brandy” while breaking the news, Harris recalled:
Then when he told me the joke, the bit about where the Jaguar won't start, I fell off the chair laughing because I knew he was a brilliant setup. And he's an incredible writer because that joke of the Jaguar not starting made you think it wasn't going to happen. Lane wasn't going to kill himself. So he set it up that he's going to kill himself. Then he gives you a fake-out so you think, ‘Oh, well that's being paid off.’ And then when he's hung himself, which he's told you all along is going to happen, you're still surprised. He's incredible.
For Mad Men fans who need a refresher (remember you can now stream the series in 4K quality with an HBO Max subscription), Lane Pryce had been embezzling funds from Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce in order to pay taxes he owed in the United Kingdom, as he’d spent so much of his own money to keep the advertising firm afloat. Don Draper discovered this after learning that his signature had been forged on a check, and fired Lane. Losing his job meant that Lane’s visa would be revoked. As if that wasn’t bad enough, upon coming home, he discovered his wife had bought him a Jaguar as a surprise.
So as Jared Harris, the son of OG Dumbledore actor Richard Harris, recollected, Lane initially tried to kill himself by carbon monoxide poisoning, but his brand-new Jaguar failed to start. The actor found it to be a darkly-amusing moment since it seems at first like Mad Men wouldn’t actually kill off his character. And then we learned that Lane hung himself in his office, leaving a boilerplate resignation letter on his person. It unquestionably ranks as one of the series’ most shocking moments, but when Michael Rosenbaum asked Harris if he felt the need to start telling people what was in store for Lane, he answered:
No. You know what is? I made a deal with Matt because Sherlock Holmes 2 was coming out as we were shooting my last episode, [I asked] if they could rearrange the schedule because there were enough days off that I had. Because I wasn't on every day, it was, I think, a 10 or 12-day shoot at that point each episode… that they could arrange it so that I could I could do the the press tour here and then the press tour in London. And I knew that was going to be a big important move for me, that movie.
Jared Harris starred in 2011’s Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows as Dr. James Moriarty, the detective’s arch-nemesis whom was only heard in the previous Sherlock Holmes movie. This was indeed one of Harris’ biggest movies, playing the main antagonist opposite Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock, and he wanted to make sure he could properly help promote it. So he came up with a compromise for Matthew Weiner, explaining:
And the line [Mad Men executive producer] Scott Hornbacher has said, ‘Look, I understand and I've tried to look at it, and I just I'm not going to be able to. It's going to be Matt's decision, but I can't without him saying it.’ So I said to Matt, ‘If you tell Scott to rearrange the schedule, I promise you that I will not go up for pilot season this year so that nobody knows that I'm no longer on the show. So when that episode airs, it will be a surprise.’
It sure was, though it’s still heartbreaking to think about what happened to Lane Pryce all those years ago. In addition to HBO Max, Mad Men can also be streamed on AMC+, albeit in HD quality. Jared Harris’ most recent movie, A House of Dynamite, can be watched with a Netflix subscription.
