Who could play a sour, unemployed, self-deprecating version of John Slattery? He had a surprising answer

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Set us as preferred John Slattery was jet-lagged in Budapest late one night after a day of shooting the 2025 drama “Nuremberg” when his old “Mad Men” co-star and friend Jon Hamm texted him with the kind of pitch that would send many actors sprinting in the opposite direction.Would he be willing to play an out-of-work version of himself who hadn’t had a gig in a decade and was shamelessly coasting on his “Mad Men” fame?Reading the script for “Gail Daughtry at the Celebrity Sex Pass” through the haze of fatigue, Slattery fixated on that one detail: “Hasn’t worked in 10 years, huh?” he recalls by phone from his home in New York.“I had to go: Wait a second.

Let me IMDb myself.” As it happens, the 63-year-old Slattery — best known for his four-time Emmy-nominated turn as the silver-haired ad executive Roger Sterling on “Mad Men” — has racked up some 30 film and TV credits since that show ended in 2015.Still, he says he was happy to detonate his cool, unflappable persona in the latest comedy from “Wet Hot American Summer” and “Role Models” filmmaker David Wain.The gleefully unhinged “Gail Daughtry,” which premiered earlier this year at Sundance and opens Friday, casts Slattery as a washed-up version of himself who is enlisted by a Midwestern woman (Zoey Deutch) who flies to Los Angeles determined to cash in on a celebrity sex pass with Hamm after discovering her fiancé cheated on her with Jennifer Aniston.For Slattery, what begins as an exercise in comic self-demolition gradually becomes the movie’s biggest surprise, with the actor turning a desperate, delusional version of himself into its most unexpectedly lovable character.Speaking with The Times, Slattery reflected on cheerfully becoming the butt of the joke, why broad comedy is anything but easy and what it’s like navigating...