Vincent Kartheiser

Mad Men, the drama set in a 60s New York ad agency, is back. John Patterson meets Vincent Kartheiser, who plays the ruthless schemer Pete Campbell.

It doesn’t take long to figure out that Vincent Kartheiser has been an actor almost all his life. For the hour that I spend with him, Kartheiser, 29 years old and acting for a good 24 of them, is on show. That’s not to say he’s showing off, but with a ready-made audience comprising myself, a photographer and a PR, he leads us on a merry dance around his Hollywood neighbourhood, talking up a storm, alternating moments of profound thoughtfulness and emotional engagement with silly voices, a lot of rolling eye-play, gossip, good jokes, impolitic thoughts about his neighbours ("I hate this guy’s dog, man. It does these human-sized shits outside my house!"), one wicked Malcolm McDowell imitation ("time for some spatchka, me little droogies!"), and then issuing surprisingly wise observations on subjects ranging from loneliness as a central theme in American art to the drinking habits of Scientologists and growing up on stage.

That perilous suspension between youth and experience is a hallmark of Pete Campbell of Sterling Cooper, Vincent’s role on the US ad agency drama set in the early 60s, Mad Men. Nominally perceived as the villain, especially after his failed attempt in season one to blackmail his mysterious creative director Don Draper - the self-made, working-class alpha to Pete’s to-the-manner-born omega - for a promotion and for his unwitting impregnation of Elisabeth Moss’s Peggy, Pete has been deepened, sweetened and rendered more complex during season two. Pretty, round-faced, callow and thin-skinned, but with a Manhattan aristocrat’s devious, bred-in-the-bone survival instinct, Pete bubbles with entitlement, snobbery and ambition, yet at heart he’s the insecure, despised scion of a faded, old-money family with a demanding father who depises his son’s career.

Pete is hard enough to like; Kartheiser once described talking about him as "like apologising for a very touchy cousin . . . he’s unaware sometimes, and he speaks before he thinks". Does Vincent Kartheiser actually like Pete Campbell?

"You know, I feel protective of him. I do that pre-emptive thing where I insult him before anyone else gets the chance to, just in conversation. I was real skinny when I was a kid, so I’d make fun of that before anyone else could. Now I meet people who say, ’Oh, you’re that Pete Campbell.’ I’m like, ’Yeah, I’m the asshole!’ before they can say it. If I have a couple of drinks in me I can get real protective, real passionate! But I love Pete Campbell! I think he’s a real fucking character, a real person and Matthew [Weiner, Mad Men’s creator and writer] does that - he writes real characters. And he writes Pete Campbell for me."

Kartheiser is out of uniform today, a long way from the tightly tailored, mostly blue period suits that Campbell wears. He’s dressed simply in jeans, a long, thin, striped scarf that functions as a useful comic prop in his more antic moments and a shirt that would look ridiculous on anyone else, but suits his model good looks to a T. The essence of Campbell - bulkier and exponentially more uptight beside the slender and laid-back Kartheiser - feels utterly absent today, except for traces of a more likable arrogance and self-confidence that Weiner has shaped and turned to the character’s advantage.

Kartheiser owns a house in Hollywood, on a block that seems frozen in the middle of gentrification. His house and several others are immaculately restored or security-fenced, while others are wrecks.

"Sleazy - that’s why I love it . . . I remember West Hollywood and Los Feliz in the mid-90s [two winded old neighbourhoods that later became trendy], they weren’t at all like they are now. That’s why I want this neighbourhood to change - so I can make money on selling my house!

"You like this house? You wanna buy it? Six hundred and fifty grand sound all right to you?"

He lives a simple life, without a lot of possessions, apparently (we never actually enter the house, so he could be making this all up). "People must wonder when they come to my house," he says. "But I don’t have a car, I don’t have any furniture, or a TV. I’m not trying to welcome people into my life!"

He’s too busy for that, he says. In fact, today he has already done two auditions. Anything good? "Aaaaahhhh," he exhales. "I can’t really say. One of them I didn’t even get a script, just my sides. Top Secret, like a Woody Allen movie or something!"

Surprisingly for an actor his age, Kartheiser makes few of the kind of career-transforming, attention-grabbing moves - or movies - that you’d expect. He’s lucky, he says, because he actually loves acting itself, not the whole brouhaha that comes along with it.

"I started on the stage, man. I did Shakespeare and everything else. I was a kid, so I’d be a page in Henry IV or Henry V. I was Tiny Tim, things like that, national roadshow tours, long runs. Then when I was 15 I came out here and started all this. I’d like to say it built discipline and character and this serious work ethic, but I’ve always just really liked acting, so it never seemed to me like any kind of sacrifice at all. But I was careful, too. When I was a kid I didn’t want to be known in the public eye too much, but I worked a lot."

So he’d probably rather not be famous?

"Well, that’s a choice I made. I chose not to audition for some projects or pursue certain agendas I could have when I was about 15. Instead I got to sit back and have faith that good things would happen. Because I just love acting. I didn’t at all mind the idea of going to auditions every day. I knew I liked this. I wasn’t that worried about cashing out."

After making his mark in movies for kids and tweens - such as Alaska and Masterminds, a sort of Die Hard in high school - Kartheiser made a definite splash alongside James Woods and Melanie Griffith in 1998’s Another Day in Paradise, Larry Clark’s second movie and for me, his very best. I have friends who worked on that set and they say it was eyebrow-deep in craziness and conflict. Anything Kartheiser would like to add to that?

He casts eyes skywards, faux-angelically. "Aaaaaahhmm, I had, uh, nothing to do with that ... " I half expect him to start whistling.

Woods and Clark, a movie about criminals and murderers as a loving family - fireworks aplenty? "Larry’s like a hell-demon - that’s what he brings to a project. He says, ’I’m gonna bring you to the darkest dark place!’ And I’m like, OK, let’s get to it! I’m 18, trying to break out in new roles, really gung-ho. I was all idealistic and uncompromising, ready to spit in anyone’s face. And James Woods is this uber-intelligent actor who’d worked with all these heavy people. He was amazing. He brought this fierceness to that character. All that improv he was throwing really energised that movie. Looking at it now, I think Woods did a damn good job of bringing me where I needed to be as a young actor, helping me look great. He’ll see right through you, and he’ll push you to the point where you’re doing something real. Really smart guy."

We circle back to the house after a photo session in a local park. I asked him to do the "Pete Campbell look" a furious jutting of the jaw and bulging of the eyes. He does it. "You can’t really see it with the beard, though. It’s all in the chin, the double chin that the collar is pushing up. It changes my whole face wearing those ’60s clothes. It’s like a disguise. When I have my long hair and when I’ve got my big old beard going, no one ever recognises me! I really like disappearing, being in movies and people not even knowing I’m in them."

I ask him about loneliness, emptiness and restlessness (as in De Tocqueville’s question, "Why are Americans so restless in the midst of such great prosperity?") as the real themes of Mad Men - not sexism or smoking or bullet-brassieres.

"Absolutely. All the men want to be Don Draper, all the women want to fuck him. Everyone thinks he’s the perfect man, and Pete Campbell is jealous of him. But Draper’s completely incomplete, completely lonely, completely detached, completely alone. It’s why he reaches out to all these women, it’s why he needs to take charge in business, to belittle Pete. He’s completely alone. Loneliness isn’t a phase or a mood, it’s a core condition of being and some of us deal with it better than others - build a family or make a million dollars. Or Draper, coming home to the empty house at the end of season one. That’s a big theme of the show: unattachment, loneliness, distance."

We part. I tell him he’s on the gold-standard show on American television right now.

"It makes me happy when I hear that but then I realise I don’t know what it means. But then again, you spend your life doing lots of things that no one even knows about, so it’s cool."

• Mad Men begins on BBC4 on 10 February