I felt that he went to that pitch and he just couldn’t lie anymore. He
looked at Ted and he just couldn’t lie anymore. And once that had been
broken through, once he told the truth in that meeting, the next thing
that happened is he had to tell Megan that he wasn’t going to
California. That was one thing, another thing he was going to lose. And
then they fired him. And I think that he realized that [Sally] was the
crucial relationship. We tried to set it up with Grandma Ida, the woman
who broke into the [apartment], that Sally really doesn’t know anything
about him. His children don’t know, and that means that he is never
going to be close to them. And I think that in the spirit of confession
that was the beginning of him reconciling who he was to tear down the
façade for his children. Specifically Sally who never saw – it’s not
supposed to look like an excuse, like “Hey, this is where I grew up,
that’s why I’m a dirtbag.” He’s just saying, I want you to know who I
am. I’m willing to risk you rejecting me because I’m so ashamed of this.
[Don's identity] is the heart of the show, not just the father’s
relationship with the kid. It’s the Jay Gatsby of it all. It’s an
American iconographic–it’s in our DNA, these slightly picaresque figures
who built this country that inspired the show for me. Rockefeller and
Bill Clinton and Sam Walton and Lee Iacocca, people who came to be the
leaders in this country–all of them came from poverty and none of them
talked about their childhoods, or they lied about them. They invented
themselves. And there’s a psychic cost to that...
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