Salvatore Romano

Sal Romano is the art director at Sterling Cooper, sharp-suited and quick with a visual joke, the office's resident wit and dandy. He's married, charming to clients, gifted at his job, and careful — always careful — about the parts of himself he keeps folded away from the fluorescent lights of the agency.

Bryan Batt plays Sal with a lightness that makes the concealment underneath ache rather than announce itself; his comic timing and easy elegance are the performance, and the loneliness only surfaces in glances. The show trusts silence around him, and Batt fills it with a whole interior life nobody at Sterling Cooper is allowed to see.