Bertram Cooper

A founding partner of Sterling Cooper, Bertram Cooper presides from behind closed doors, shoeless, sipping tea, quoting Ayn Rand and Japanese aesthetics with the same placid certainty. He rarely raises his voice or his stakes, preferring to let younger men scramble while he offers gnomic pronouncements that turn out, infuriatingly, to be right.

Robert Morse plays him as a man entirely unbothered by the twentieth century, which makes him both comic relief and moral barometer. The writing uses his eccentricity as camouflage for shrewdness — he sees through Don before anyone else does — and Morse's old vaudeville instincts give even his stillness a wink.