by Krista Madden

For Mad Men fans this April is going to be an emotional time, saying goodbye to our favourite characters as Mad Men returns on April 5th with its final series. Loose ends will be tied, story lines will be wrapped up. Jon Hamm describes facing the end of the show as ‘trippy’. As you can imagine. His character was the making of him professionally. But how have the cast coped with the breaking up of the special Mad Men family, well if Don Draper admitted to shedding a tear then so can we.
He told People Magazine that he cried after ‘cut!’ was called on his final take on the 3rd July last year, as apparently did the rest of the cast.
Creator of Mad Men, Matthew Weiner described the last night of filming as ’emotional and completely surreal because it was something we’d been anticipating – the mood of finishing the show had been hanging over us all for months as the final scripts were coming in – and then, here we were at the moment’.
He went on to say that ‘after Jon’s last shot, there were probably 350 people on stage. We had champagne, and he and I both [spoke]. Yearbooks had been made for all of the cast and crew, so people were signing the yearbooks and hugging and taking pictures’.
Some cast members even picked up Mad Men keepsakes that meant the most to them. Elisabeth Moss (who plays Peggy Olson), in her own words, ‘pillaged!’. She took a ring that her character had worn in every episode and the red thermos that Peggy carries every time she leaves a job.
Jon told People Magazine ‘Lizzie [Moss] and I were a little more sanguine about [ending the series] than others, I think. We were like, ‘We’re not dead!”.
Mad Men airs on April 16th on Sky Atlantic 3 days after it airs in the US on the 13th April.