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"When we heard the news that Mad Men won&amp;#039;t be returning until next year, Digital Spy was a little bit upset. Of course we&amp;#039;re glad that the show&amp;#039;s coming back, but how are we supposed to wait that long? Luckily, we managed to have a quick chat about the show with Jared Harris - who plays Lane Pryce - while he was promoting his movie The Ward (out on DVD and Blu-ray in October). That should put off the withdrawal symptoms for a little while! Read on to find out what Jared had to say... Are you glad the contractual problems were resolved with Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner? &amp;quot;They just had to renegotiate. He&amp;#039;s on a two-year contract and it came to the end of the two years. For some reason, the people who are on the other side of these things tend to think they&amp;#039;re in a stronger position if they leave you waiting. They&amp;#039;ll try to push you against the wall and make deals that are disadvantageous to yourself because it&amp;#039;s a business thing. They&amp;#039;re trying to get you to work for as little as possible. If they could get you to do it for free they would!&amp;quot; We saw a lot of different sides to Lane last season. How will that continue in season five? &amp;quot;They don&amp;#039;t tell you anything. I have no idea. You literally get the script the day before you start shooting the episode and you scramble through it, you find out if your character&amp;#039;s dead or fired that way. You don&amp;#039;t get any warning. You read it with a sense of trepidation. I have absolutely no idea, I don&amp;#039;t know what&amp;#039;s going to happen. I don&amp;#039;t know how [Weiner is] going to keep all these characters in the story who keep shooting off in such different directions. When you think about what&amp;#039;s happening with January&amp;#039;s character [Betty] and where Jon&amp;#039;s character [Don] is going. At one point it seemed like he was going to head off to an ashram or something on a voyage of self-discovery. I&amp;#039;m very happy to be on the show. The atmosphere is fantastic, the people are very cool, there&amp;#039;s no edge there. There are no divas, it&amp;#039;s a very good place to work and everyone loves it, including the crew.&amp;quot; Do you ever talk to the writers about Lane&amp;#039;s past? Obviously we know he&amp;#039;s from the UK and struggled to adapt to the US, but is there a backstory you have for him? &amp;quot;A little bit. At one point there was talk about the character being Jewish or something like that. [Weiner] wanted there to be a reason why he hit a glass ceiling in England and wasn&amp;#039;t going to go further in the company. I was fine with that but they decided that I don&amp;#039;t really look Jewish. I said that in England, the class system being the way it is, you don&amp;#039;t need something like that. It can be about where you went to school and your background. You&amp;#039;ll get as far as you can playing by the rules, up to a certain level, then you&amp;#039;ll hit the glass ceiling. I thought that Lane, not unlike my stepfather, he&amp;#039;d gone to one of those grammar schools in Liverpool. If you want to be accepted you adopt the ways and you sound like the world that you want them to believe you belong in. In my mind Lane did not come from that background and he&amp;#039;s tried to assimilate himself into that club. He&amp;#039;s a social climber and he&amp;#039;s gotten as far as he can get. He realised he was going to be shut out in that way and he was. I think that&amp;#039;s one of the things he loves about America - there&amp;#039;s a tremendous sense of social mobility. We talked a little about his war experience. One of the things he mentioned is he wanted the character to be like Alec Guinness in Bridge Over the River Kwai. He would have done something in the war, he&amp;#039;s of an age where he would have been called up.&amp;quot; Mad Men has become something of a pop culture phenomenon. Do you have any thoughts about why that is? &amp;quot;I think there&amp;#039;s a couple of different things. First of all, everyone looks fantastic. The men look great and the women are curvy and look like women. The other thing about it is it&amp;#039;s very clever in how it started at the end of the 50s and there&amp;#039;s an idea of America that is fixed in people&amp;#039;s minds. It&amp;#039;s the American Dream that people imagine was possible in this country around about that time. There was a sense that everyone can get a piece of the American Dream but it was very much a white man&amp;#039;s world and all the changes that were wrought upon that country during the 60s are still being fought over and argued over now. Some of the things they&amp;#039;re trying to roll back politically. It&amp;#039;s that sense of perspective, that&amp;#039;s partly what it is. Although there&amp;#039;s an idea that things were very rigid back then, that&amp;#039;s just the veneer of respectability. People were doing the same things they were doing now, just in secret. It&amp;#039;s very smart, it&amp;#039;s a smart show. Not just the dialogue but what each episode is about. [Weiner&amp;#039;s] got a very good grip on human nature.&amp;quot; Mad Men will air on AMC in the US and Sky Atlantic in the UK next year. The Ward will be released on DVD and Blu-Ray in October. Are you looking forward to the return of Mad Men? What do you make of Jared&amp;#039;s comments? Let us know below! "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/tv/mad-men/interviews/a322535/mad-men-a-quick-chat-with-jared-harris/>