Bryan Batt on “Mad Men” and being out in Hollywood: “If you are openly gay, the masses can be asses.”

Bryan Batt hasn’t just been sitting around since his character of Salvatore Romano was written out of Mad Men last season. The multi-talented actor just finished shooting a guest role on the final two episodes of ABC’s Ugly Betty which ends its four-year run in May.

But he’d love to return to the AMC series – season 3 comes out on DVD next week – and the role of the closeted gay art director at the Sterling Cooper ad agency in the early 1960s. Sal was fired last season after he rebuffed the advances of a make client whose account is worth $25 million to the company.

“Sal could have prevented that by taking one for the team but I don’t think Sal was ready for that,” Batt said in an interview with Huffington Post. “The guy was kind of creepy and drunk and it was seedy how it happened. What it boils down to is he’s not going to do anything that jeopardizes his position at Sterling Cooper, but when he tried to do the right thing, he was screwed. In one way.”

Sal’s last scene had him calling his wife from a phone booth in a tawdry corner of Central Park, looking ready to go get screwed in quite another way.

“I’m just praying that the last time we saw him at the phone booth, that he doesn’t end up on a ramble for the rest of his life,” Bryan said. “But that was one of the options of the time, unfortunately.”

The Broadway veteran has a memoir out in May and would be happy to return to the Emmy-winning series: “I’d be on a plane in a second! Are you kidding me? In a nanosecond, with the slicked hair and ready to go.”

Whatever happens, Bryan has no regrets about being honest about his sexuality.

Still,  he understands why many actors choose not to be: “If you are openly gay, the masses can be asses and sometimes can’t get past the fact that that’s how someone lives their private life. Some actors have to make a choice. If they have the opportunity to become these huge megastars, making millions and millions of dollars and have to live a lie, that’s a choice they have to make. Not that I would ever be a big star, but I just had to live my life the way I saw fit.”