Quotes from Rich Sommer

I abhor 'baby talk.' I speak to kids like I would any other person, and they seem to respond to it.

I'm a Joseph Abboud fan. I'm a Hugo Boss fan. I'm a Brooks Brothers fan. As far as suits go, those are my go-tos.

I don't know if it's the sunshine, or the fact that I actually have a job, but I do like L.A. a lot. In New York, it can be gray and rainy and cold, and you still don't have any money, and you feel like a bad Dickens character.

I'll usually stay up a little later than my wife and play Xbox, a little 'Modern Warfare 3.' Or I'll have a friend over, and we'll play board games until late at night. I'll always choose fun over sleep.

The 12 years that I was improvising are why I got the number of commercials I got when I was in New York and why I got The Devil Wears Prada, and its why I even got in the door for Mad Men.

Before 'Mad Men,' I definitely had very dry spells and I know what those feel like, and I don't think that ever leaves you as an actor.

Gaming has been a great way to get to know people. That's part of what I love about games, that they are social.

The amount of times my wife has rolled her eyes at board games is impossible to count.

Three times a year, there's Strategicon convention, and I go for the board games. It happens Presidents Day, Labor Day, and Memorial Day weekends. You go and take a look at the new board games and meet a couple of board game designers, and you can check out games you don't own from the library and then return them.

In college, my friend Melanie and I used to have weekly Jimmy Stewart viewings, and 'Harvey' seemed to make its way into the rotation an inordinate amount of times.

I'm very, very fortunate to be in the job that I'm in, and I would love for it to continue forever, but it won't. I have to financially and emotionally prepare for the day that 'Mad Men' will go away, because who knows what my next job is going to be?

Anytime you're on camera, 95 percent of whatever character you're playing, unless you're Daniel Day-Lewis - or maybe, no, pretty much just him - you're cast because you're you.

I've certainly had less practice at fatherhood than I have at acting, but in fatherhood, at least my failures are private!

So what's so enticing about doing a play is that you get to do that thing that got you into acting in the first place... There's a real attraction to being able to play, to just play. And that's something that theater affords you.

I would like to ban people being allowed to text while in a crosswalk.

I am a board game enthusiast, a board game evangelist, a board game nerd, but I wouldn't say I'm 'keen' because I very rarely win, and 'keen' suggests you're actually good at something. But I do play a lot of them, and I have a pretty good-sized collection.

I wonder if games are maybe a terminus for ideas. Things can be books or movies or operas or plays, but once they're a game, that's where they should end. Things shouldn't start as games and be taken to movies.

For the three years I lived in New York leading up to moving out to Los Angeles for 'Mad Men,' I was an office temp at Ernst & Young in Times Square. That's about as desk-jobby as it can get. There was a lot of, 'Go two floors up and make a copy of this and then bring it to me.'

I'm pretty quick to delete something off of my phone if it's become obsolete. And things like RSS readers have made life easier - all of the headlines are going to be related to a topic I'm interested in.

After 'Urinetown,' 'Avenue Q' and now 'Mormon,' is there an envelope remaining to be pushed?

Improv definitely made me a better auditioner, without a doubt. We did do an audition semester in grad school, and that was helpful for those times that you have a script and you have a few days to prepare it, to really work on sides. But the auditions I was doing in New York, if you got it the night before, you were very lucky.

The worst job I ever had was as a telemarketer for, oh, I don't know, I think I made it about 90 minutes. I quit before lunch. I went in around 10:30 or 11 and said, 'I can't do this.' It was horrific. I had too many people yell at me within that 90 minutes to be able to continue.

I have an RSS reader, Feeddler. I mostly subscribe to board game blogs - they have reviews of new games and discussions about trends. It's straight-up dork talk.

The work that I've gotten in the hiatuses seems to indicate that I will have a little more work after 'Mad Men' than I did when I was scraping by while I was temping in New York, but who knows? People very easily could be like, 'Meh, we're done with that. We've got Jon Hamm. We're good without the weird one with glasses.'