Rich Sommer York Quotations

I don't know if it's the sunshine, or the fact that I actually have a job, but I do like L.A. a lot. In New York, it can be gray and rainy and cold, and you still don't have any money, and you feel like a bad Dickens character.

Improv definitely made me a better auditioner, without a doubt. We did do an audition semester in grad school, and that was helpful for those times that you have a script and you have a few days to prepare it, to really work on sides. But the auditions I was doing in New York, if you got it the night before, you were very lucky.

The 12 years that I was improvising are why I got the number of commercials I got when I was in New York and why I got The Devil Wears Prada, and its why I even got in the door for Mad Men.

I was a temp for three years in New York when I was auditioning; when I was cast in 'Mad Men,' I was still a temp. I'm good at making copies; I'm good at typing things. I'm good at killing the day and making it look like I'm doing something.

For the three years I lived in New York leading up to moving out to Los Angeles for 'Mad Men,' I was an office temp at Ernst & Young in Times Square. That's about as desk-jobby as it can get. There was a lot of, 'Go two floors up and make a copy of this and then bring it to me.'