Mad Men star Jared Harris has revealed the way the cast of the acclaimed advertising drama constantly drank Scotch and smoked cigarettes throughout the show’s seven seasons.
The 64-year-old actor played British financial officer Lane Pryce from seasons three to five of the show, with Jon Hamm in the lead role of chief ad man Donald Draper.
Harris revealed that the office drinks that his and Hamm’s characters consumed weren’t alcoholic but were actually “sugar water, which is horrible”.
He told The Guardian : “The cigarettes are herbal cigarettes, which are impossible to keep lit, which is why you see everyone puffing really hard. It makes everybody look like complete nicotine addicts.”
Mad Men heavily incorporated cigarettes throughout its seven seasons as the show’s fictional firm, Sterling Cooper, ran the advertising account for tobacco brand Lucky Strike.
Harris’s behind-the-scenes revelation comes after Hamm and John Slattery, who played Roger Sterling in the show, shared what was in the martinis the cast consumed on-screen this June.
“Oh, the breath was lovely,” Hamm told Austin’s ATX TV Festival in June.
“Pop another pearl onion in your glass of water, and then smoke 26 more fake cigarettes and it’s 9:30 in the morning!” Slattery said of the herbal smokes, which were made of rose petals and marshmallows.
“I think somebody did a count, and in the pilot alone, I smoke 75 cigarettes,” Hamm said.
He added: “They are fake cigarettes, but that just means that there’s no nicotine in them. It doesn’t mean you’re not burning something.”
The Your Friends & Neighbours star revealed some of the younger Mad Men cast had actually tried to smoke real cigarettes in the show’s early scenes rather than fake ones.
“I was like, ‘let me know how that goes.’ And within three days, they were yellow and sallow. This is a terrible idea,” Hamm said of the method approach.
Harris left Mad Men in 2012 and was nominated for the Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for his performance as Lane that year.
He went on to star as King George VI in the historical drama series The Crown and Valery Legasov in the acclaimed Sky Atlantic miniseries Chernobyl, for which he won a TV Bafta for Best Actor.
