When speaking to affable Midwesterner Vincent Kartheiser, it’s hard to believe he’s the same guy who plays despicable Pete Campbell on “Mad Men.” Campbell cheats on his wife, asks Joan Holloway to sleep with a creepy Jaguar exec to land an account, and once tried to blackmail Don Draper into giving him a promotion.
Kartheiser, 33, speaks more slowly than Campbell, and he is quick to laugh. He sounds more at ease with himself than weasel-like Pete, who talks quickly, in a clipped, high voice that drips with pomposity.
And they certainly look different. Kartheiser usually wears his hair longer, shaggy and messy when he isn’t filming, instead of slicking it back. In place of that smug Campbell grin, Kartheiser is mostly photographed sporting a plaid shirt and a big, goofy smile.
Yep, the biggest scumbag on TV is played by a regular dude who’s buddies with his co-stars and stays in touch with an acting pal he knew when he was just 6 years old.
“I’m not ambitious, and I’m happily a beta male,” Kartheiser says, “whereas Pete Campbell is regretfully a beta male.”
In spite of being on an Emmy-winning TV show, Kartheiser insists he’s not success crazed. “[Pete’s] ambition drives a lot of his behavior. [His] ambition is what makes him into a competitor with Ken [Cosgrove, an account exec on “Mad Men”] and not a friend to Ken, which turns him into someone who wants to take down Don in the first couple of seasons,” he says. “If I was Pete Campbell and not Vincent Kartheiser, no way I’d be friends with John Slattery or Jon Hamm or any of the other actors on-set. I would always be vying against them to be more important or to have more attention than them.
“So the fact that he’s ambitious and I’m not is quite a big difference.”
In fact, Campbell was so unhappy with his underdog status last season, fans feared the character would commit suicide — something Kartheiser doesn’t rule out.
“Pete might kill himself,” he says. “I’m serious.” (The show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, denies it will happen this season.)
But Campbell and Kartheiser do have one very important thing in common — taste in women.
Last month, Kartheiser got engaged to Alexis Bledel, who played Beth Dawes, a depressed housewife Campbell falls for on “Mad Men.” Sadly, she finished the season getting electroshock treatment and forgetting his existence.
Fans were shocked to see the actor who plays one of the creepiest men on television betrothed to Bledel, who is best known for playing Rory Gilmore, a sweet honors student from the teen drama “Gilmore Girls.” “Alexis is very different than Beth, and I’m not like Pete,” Kartheiser insists. “Actually, we were not dating when we worked together. That happened a couple months after we were done filming. I ran into in her in New York. Me and Pete Campbell were never double-dating Alexis Bledel and Beth Dawes, no. At different times — yes.”
Before their engagement, Bledel talked to the AMC blog about her co-star. “[Vincent is] light and funny and has lots of energy on-set. He keeps everybody energized, as well,” she said.
His love for acting was also evident from a young age. At 6, Kartheiser joined a small production house called Children’s Theatre Company in his hometown of Minneapolis.
Local actor Gerald Drake worked with Kartheiser and his sister Collette Kartheiser, in productions of “Treasure Island,” “Our Town,” and “The Velveteen Rabbit,” and remembers the young actor standing out.
“We had a great time in ‘Treasure Island.’ I was Long John Silver and he was Jim Hawkins. There’s a review from 1992 I have here that says, ‘Vincent Kartheiser is natural and unaffected.’ And I feel that way about him, too,” Drake says.
When Kartheiser returns home, he still visits the theater. Drake, now 65, has kept in touch with his younger co-star over the years via e-mail and watches him every week on “Mad Men.”
“Vinnie is wild and crazy and filled with simplicity. And he knows how to channel it and use it on-camera, to temper the moment and yet know when you can be wild and crazy,” Drake says. “I see that in the ‘Mad Men’ character — the ability to walk into a room and turn on a dime and say something and do something that makes you go, ‘Whoa!’ ”
Drake remembers when Kartheiser, the youngest of six kids, left Minnesota in 1993 for his first big-screen feature, “Untamed Heart.”
“He was going to go out to California, and I said, ‘Vinnie, when you get going out there, you be sure to call me and take care of me!’ We laughed. I was almost serious.”
Kartheiser later attended UCLA, where he got a bachelor’s degree in history. His first big TV role was on the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” spinoff series “Angel,” where he played Connor, Angel’s son. It was from there, in 2007, that he went on to “Mad Men.”
When Kartheiser began playing Pete, the contrasts between the low-maintenance actor and his materialistic character were even more pronounced. In one interview from the early days, Kartheiser said he didn’t own a car or a toilet.
“I don’t have a toilet at the moment. My house is just a wooden box. I mean, I am planning to get a toilet at some point. But for now I have to go to the neighbors’,” he told the UK’s Observer in 2010. (He later clarified that he was in the middle of a home renovation and waiting for a toilet to be delivered.)
A few months later, he told MSNBC that he was a vegetarian and choosing not to have children for environmental reasons. But, he tells The Post, he now eats meat and has changed his views on having kids. He won’t give a reason for his change of heart, but one suspects Bledel has something to do with it.
“I used to be more passionate about environmental issues. Now, I try not to be too wasteful, but I’m not as proactive anymore,” he says. “It’s taken a back seat for me in my life. I’m focusing on other things right now.”
Domestic life, the ultimate anathema to Pete Campbell, might just satisfy the guy who plays him.