Hollywood has rules. Especially where journalists and hot actors are
concerned. Interviews take place in a publicist’s office or on set, your
time is strictly calibrated — an hour is good going — and there’s always
someone listening to make sure nobody misbehaves or says anything
interesting. Those are the rules, and Jon Hamm breaks every one.
Perhaps it’s because the 37-year-old Golden Globe-winning star of the hit
television drama Mad Men came to fame later in life that he’s so dismissive
of showbiz convention. Perhaps it’s down to his teaching career, or his
gut-wrenching personal tragedies. Whatever it is, he picks his local diner
for the interview, arrives bang on time, stays for an astonishing two and a
half hours, insists on picking up the bill himself (“These are my people”),
then walks me to a cab rank a good 20 minutes away. By the end of the
interview, I’m telling him what I think, as if he actually cares what a
journalist has to say.
And I’m not alone. During the interview, people keep walking up and breaking
into conversation with him — usually about smoking. “Man, your show is
great,” a passing Australian surfer dude tells him. “I’ve given up, but I
still smoke a couple when I’ve had a beer or two.” He’s the third in an
hour, but Hamm breaks into a grin, as if it’s the first time anyone’s
spotted him. “I know what you mean,” he shakes his head ruefully. “I still
sneak a few in. When you’re 22, you smoke cigarettes like, ‘I’m
bulletproof!’ Then you get older and . . . ” We all nod wisely, and the dude
walks away.
Smokers and non-smokers alike seem to love Hamm for secretly reclaiming the
cigarette’s claim on cool. Mad Men’s 1960s Madison Avenue advertising
executives wear sharp suits, drink martinis at lunchtime and puff away every
minute of the day. Hamm’s Don Draper, creative director of the fictional
Sterling Cooper, lights up in meetings, in the kitchen and in his mistress’s
bed. The series has caught on around the globe and catapulted him from
jobbing actor to potential movie star, with a part as a government scientist
in the big-budget remake of the 1950s sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood
Still.
“It’s weird how the show has resonated around the world,” Hamm muses.
“Australia, New Zealand . . . and the Italians love it. For them, it’s a
show about clothes and tits — they’re like, ‘Hey! That’s made for me!’ The
worry at the beginning was that it was such an American show, about a really
specific period in US history. But it’s a show about happiness, I
think. These guys had always been the masters of the universe. If you were
white and male in the United States, and were wealthy and had a good job,
you could do whatever you wanted. Yet they’re still not happy. It’s about a
kind of generational ennui, and everyone seems to relate to that. Because,
before this recession approached, people had money and houses and everything
they wanted to buy, but they still weren’t happy. I think we were kind of
freaked out that we weren’t, and we were trying not to show it.”
When Hamm saw the script, written by the Sopranos scribe Matthew Weiner, he
knew it was career-changingly good. He read the part of Draper and thought,
I wonder which movie star they’ll give it to? Maybe Rob Lowe? He started the
auditions at the bottom of the list and had to audition for so many people,
he’s lost count of how many times he told them what he could bring to the
character.
As Hamm sits in the California sun in shorts and a casual shirt, petting his
dog as it bounds around the tables flirting with customers, and speaking in
a soft, mellow drawl punctuated with mini impressions of actors and comics,
it’s hard to see exactly how he persuaded them. If you wanted to
describe the polar opposite of Don Draper, you’d probably come up with Jon
Hamm. It’s such a powerful switch that it seems to be more than acting. It’s
as if he’s channelling something from a long way away. And, in a sense,
that’s exactly what he’s doing. Because what he brought to the character, he
explains, was his father.
Hamm’s tragedy is monumental, deeply personal and involves the rawest of
nerves — his mother and his father. They divorced when he was two, and for
the next eight years he lived with his mother. Then, when he was 10, her
persistent stomach ache turned out to be an advanced cancer that had spread
rapidly through her body. They removed two-thirds of her colon and in the
end it killed her. He moved in with his father, but after a few years his
dad fell ill, too. He slowly weakened and drifted away until, when Hamm was
20, his father also died.
It seems intrusive to bring this up, to even know this, without having got
drunk with the man and exchanged confessions with our elbows in pools of
beer and our eyes misting over. So I ask about the work and how he built his
character from echoes of his long-dead parent.
“My dad was a businessman in the 1960s,” he begins. Then he stops and corrects
himself for not giving me enough information. “I’m from a small town in the
middle of the country called St Louis. It’s a small town. Ish. It’s fairly
conservative. And my dad was originally a big fish in that small pond. Like
most men in most places in the late 1960s and 1970s, he saw that power dry
up. He was a big guy, close to 300lb, 6ft 2in, a really big guy up until the
mid- to late 1970s, when he was diagnosed with diabetes and lost, like,
120lb. I didn’t come around until the 1970s, so I knew him as a very slim
guy, but to his friends he was this hulking Tony Soprano businessman who
worked in trucking.” Hamm stops, laughs, then explains. “Working in
trucking, he worked with the mafia and the teamsters [union]. It was not a
shy business.”
Right, I say — and, to show I’ve watched a few gangster movies, I make some
joke about having people killed. Hamm puts his head on one side and smiles.
“At my father’s funeral, a guy came up to me, gave me the heavy handshake
and said, ‘You don’t know me, but I knew your father very well.’ He gave me
his card and said, ‘If you ever need anything... ’ I was 20 years old,
and I was like, ‘I know exactly who you are, my dad talked about you a lot.’
” He shakes his head. “There were a lot of shady characters in that
industry.”
I take the funeral as a jumping-off point and ask about his parents’ deaths.
He begins very matter-of-fact. “My mom was a secretary, and she was a great
mom from what I remember. She took care of me and set me on the right path
to get me to where I am now. That doesn’t happen by accident, you know. I
have very clear memories of her death, obviously” — and here his voice dips,
becoming soft and quiet — “but at 10, you’re just a kid. You think the day
starts when you wake up, and it stops when you go to sleep, and taking a
bath sucks, and playing is fun. And if every day could involve football,
that would be great. There is no global sense of. . . whatever.” He clears
his throat. “So, when those events happen, it’s only much later that you
realise the importance of it.”
He pauses. “At least, that was the case with me. I came to it after my
dad died. I was sitting somewhere and it all just landed on me. I was like,
I’ve been on this planet for two decades and I have no parents. I never
really got a chance to have an adult conversation with them . . . and that’s
a drag.” He suddenly bats the subject away. “Which is what it
is.”
As the joke goes, show me a comic and I’ll show you someone whose mother died
before they were 15. I offer the remark to Hamm. “Nobody gets though an
experience like that without a tremendous amount of luck,” he nods. “I had
teachers and friends’ parents — lots of parental figures. For whatever
reason, I was smart enough to take their counsel and stay out of harm’s way
at the sundry times when it could all have gone wrong. But you’re right
about the crucible of that experience. Most people who do anything in their
life do it out of a sense of urgency or a sense of desire to restore some
sort of order at the end. I’m good friends with a lot of comedians, and
they’re a pretty messed-up lot. But so are actors. My God. The better the
actor, the weirder the story.” But you don’t seem messed up, I say. “Maybe
I’m not that kind of actor.”
It was one of those parental figures, an acting teacher at his high school,
who took the sports-mad young Hamm and nudged him onto the path to
Hollywood. He was a down-the-line athlete, playing football and baseball and
swimming for the school. But, unlike the jocks of The Breakfast Club, his
high school insisted that students work across every discipline and
encouraged all of them to take part in everything. It wasn’t cool to be good
at just one thing.
So, when Hamm was 16 and a new theatre teacher turned up who cast students
according to who he thought would be right for the part, rather than who
turned up for audition, Hamm found himself in a play. And he liked it.
Later, studying English at the University of Missouri, he saw an ad from a
theatre company looking to cast A Midsummer Night’s Dream from the student
body. He thought, why not? And he ended up getting the part. By the time he
graduated, he’d performed in 15 plays and thought maybe he could do this for
a living. First, though, he had a debt to pay. His high school had given him
so much support through the savagery of his adolescent years that he went
back to teach there for a year before taking the trip to Los Angeles.
He hit Hollywood with a letter of introduction to the mighty William Morris
agency, settled into a house with four other actors, got work as a waiter
and started going to auditions, looking for the role of his dreams. Three
years and not a single job later, William Morris dropped him and he was
suddenly just a waiter in LA.
“You either suck that up and find another agent, or you go home and say you
gave it a shot, but that’s the end of that,” Hamm says simply. “The last
thing I wanted to be out here was one of those actors who’s 45 years old,
with a tenuous grasp of their own reality, and not really working much. So I
gave myself five years. I said, if I can’t get it going by the time
I’m 30, I’m in the wrong place. And as soon as I said that, it’s
like I started working right away.”
The work included plays, a semi-regular role as a fireman in the NBC drama
Providence and some very odd day jobs. In a twisted version of a goofy
romcom script, he was working as a set dresser on a softcore porn movie —
“I’d never done set dressing before but, hey, it was a porn movie.
If the audience were focused on where the ashtray was from shot to shot,
then the movie had already failed” — when he met the love of his life, the
actress Jennifer Westfeldt.
“We’d met briefly through a mutual friend at a party, and I’d helped her with
an audition,” he begins. “I’m in the midst of this incredibly depressing
porn job, I come home one night and there’s a message from Jen: ‘Hey, I
don’t know if you remember me, but we’re doing this play in New York, and we
need a guy, and we can’t find the right guy in New York, and we thought of
you.’ I thought, it’s work, I’m currently in the worst job ever, so even if
it’s a play about farting, I’ll do it.”
You didn’t see the fact that she couldn’t find the right guy in the whole of
New York as a possible come-on, Jon? “She had a boyfriend, and I was playing
the field, so no,” he grins. “We really got to know each other over six
months. After that, we got together — and that was 10 years ago.” He even
manages to say, “She’s a really wonderful woman and has been a positive
influence on my life”, without it sounding cloying. “I don’t know about
marriage,” he adds. “Not yet. I think it’s one of those things where if we
ever feel it’s necessary, we’ll do it. Whether it’s kids or . . . whatever
it happens to be. We just really like where we are right now, and we don’t
want to mess with it.”
Where Hamm is now includes appearing opposite Keanu Reeves and Jennifer
Connolly in The Day the Earth Stood Still — with Reeves playing an alien who
comes to save humanity from itself. “It’s a very modern remake,” he is keen
to point out, proving he's not just about the black-and-white era. “The
original was a product of the cold war, but they’ve swapped that allegory
for global warming — the idea is, if you’re not going to take care of the
planet, we’re going to take it away from you. I think with the icecaps
melting, no snow on Kilimanjaro and it being 100 degrees in November —
that’s a good switch.”
Which leads him to a riff on Obama, the election and how television satires
such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report became the left’s response to
right-wing talk shows. At which point, he moves on to The Day Today, Brass
Eye and British humour generally, with the passion of a true comedy nerd. “I was
onto Russell Brand and Sacha Baron Cohen ages ago, but I only picked up on
Chris Morris recently,” he enthuses.
This brings him to the pinnacle of his career to date: he recently presented
America’s comedy crucible, Saturday Night Live. “Seriously, I used to wear
out the grooves on my Monty Python and Steve Martin records when I was a
kid. Hosting SNL, it was literally a childhood dream — I never, ever thought
I’d get to do that. Every day leading up to it, I’d be phoning: am I still
allowed to come?”
It turns out our waiter saw that show. He’s so buzzed that Hamm is back in his
diner, he can’t stop talking as he presents the bill. “I knew you’d been in
and out over the past few months, and last time you said hi to me,” he
bubbles. “And I’m like, hi, but all my friends are like . . . dude! So I saw
the show, it was really nice . . .so tonight me and my wife are going to a
fancy-dress party as Mr and Mrs Draper.” Then he rushes away to call his
wife, and it’s clear that, in this particular part of Hollywood at
least, Jon Hamm rules.
The Day the Earth Stood Still opens on Dec 12. Mad Men returns in spring
