The fourth season of American series Mad Men has just come to an end...
"The last Alpha male" is the title of this editorial by Adam Sachs featuring Jon Hamm shot by Norman Jean Roy.
After years of struggling, Mad Men star Joan Hamm has finally arrived, creating a style icon who's come to help us rediscover our lost masculine cool. Will his drive take him to big-screen stardom with 'The Town' or just out for nachos ?
Fuck. You. Motorcycles, Jon Hamm says in a low, grinning growl. The delivery is pure Don Draper, but the guy behind the wheel is looking a whole lot more laid-back in his madras shorts, Wayfarers, and beat-up St. Louis Cardinals cap than his tortured television alter ego ever does.
It's a sunny summer day in Malibu, the kind that makes any trip up the Pacific Coast Highway feel like a car commercial or a scene from a jubilant surf movie. Or that's how it would feel if this pack of leather-trousered bikers would kindly unclog the road. The moment there's an opening between the hogs, Hamm hits the accelerator and we take off, a silver blur hurtling toward Oxnard. The blur, in case you can't make it out, is a not-yet-released gullwing SLS AMG, on loan from the good folks at Mercedes-Benz.
This is, as Hamm notes, a "bizarrely lunatic car". It's insanely fast. "That was 140," he says calmly as he eases back down to a reasonable, autobahn-worthy pace. Hamm recently became the voice of Mercedes, lending his sonorous, all-comforting, all-promising pitchman's authority to its TV spots.
"It's funny, right ? Kind of this weird synergy," Hamm says, alluding to the fact that the role he's most identified with -Don Draper, the powerful and powerfully conflicted master of advertising on AMC's Mad Men- has now led to an actual gig selling cars.
"It's strange, but it's good for me. I vote yes".
His lazy-Sunday strategy is to drive nowhere in particular, avoid any unwanted attention from the California Highway Patrol, maybe pick up some lunch. The plan is to not have much of a plan, which seems to suit Hamm just fine. The 39-year-old has a rare weekend off from shooting Season 4 of Mad Men. As a kind of in-town vacation,
he and his longtime girlfriend, actress and screenwriter Jennifer Westfeldt, are borrowing a cottage right on the beach in Malibu.
When I showed up earlier in the day, their big dog, Cora, a shepherd mix, was happily lounging in the sand. Westfeldt was waiting on friends, and she and Hamm had plans to fire up the Big Green Egg. Sinatra was playing in the living room. Hamm and Westfeldt have an easygoing sweetness with each other that comes from being together a dozen years and getting off on the same stuff. They offered me a drink ("Budweiser -in a can, no less") and talked about a film they're producing this fall that Westfeldt wrote called 'Friends with Kids'.
It would be easy to draw parallels between this borrowed California-dream life -the idyllic beach house and the exotic super-car, both on loan- and the feints and fictions of Don Draper's borrowed life. Unfortunately, that would be pretty much bullshit. Because unlike Draper, Hamm isn't a man from nowhere. For the past 15 years he's been living here in Los Angeles, piecing together his résumé, quietly building a career and a life.
And if it's taken this long for him to enter the American consciousness as an archetype of homegrown masculinity, well, we probably have ourselves to blame. Every generation gets the heroes it deserves.
All the drifters eventually end up here in Southern California", Hamm says as we meander along the coastal highway. I came out to visit with my mom when I was 9 years old and then again right after she died. I liked the cars, I liked the sun. I just thought, 'This is for me.
Hamm grew up in St Louis. His parents split when he was 2, and his mother raised him. Weekends were spent with his father, a larger-than-life character in the trucking industry who'd take him along to bars and clubs after work. Then, when Hamm was 10, everything unraveled horribly : his mother died of cancer. He was sent to live with his grandmother. His father died his sophomore year in college.
In school he played sports as much as he acted -but something kept drawing him back to performing. As he puts it,
"I never minded standing up and looking like an idiot, which is tremendously helpful in this industry and not so much in others".
Hamm's high-school girlfriend's older brother's college roommate was an eager actor named Paul Rudd. Hamm fell in with Rudd and his gang and visited them in L.A. in 1992, crashing in their "shit-hole North Hollywood apartment" during the spring break of his junior year. He came out for good in 1995. "At a certain point", he says,
"I figured I was way too far down the line for a normal career. I was waiting tables with a friend who had been a business major, and he really wanted to get this job selling copiers. I just thought, 'Really ? You really want that job ?
' My dad was a salesman. He could sell anything to anybody. I was like, 'Nah, not for me'". Hamm arrived in Hollywood just in time for the reign of the CW and the WB.
"If you didn't look 18 years old, you weren't working. And I didn't look 18 years old when I was 18. I always looked 10 years older than I was".
Really, though, Hamm was never in danger of taking the easy route.
"L.A. represents opportunity", he says. "And, as has been proven over and over in the current media landscape, it doesn't take much for them to put you on TV. If that's all you want, you can be on 'The Bachelor' or 'The Real Housewives' or whatever show just wants oversized personalities, ridiculous behavior, and zero dignity".
But don't you need a burning desire to break through ? To be crazy enough to think you can show up and be anointed for fame ?
"I don't know", Hamm says.
"When you try to learn how to act, you approach it with respect. But if you just want to be famous . . . that's not that much different than porn. 'I'm a movie star !' Well, no, you're not. You're a porn star, and that's completely different. And you know, hey, mazel tov -porn probably built half the houses out here, but you're selling your dignity in a way that I feel I'm not. And once you sell it, it's gone. You ain't getting it back".
There are certain tones that Hamm strikes -whether by accident or by force of habit- that lend his casual pronouncements the feel of a Don Draper delivery. Sometimes it's the purse-lipped, tight-jawed verbal sneer. Like when he says : "And once you sell it, it's gone".
Bottom line :
If we didn't like Hamm's Don Draper, Mad Men would be a flop. What this portends for the future of Hamm's career it's too early to say. One good sign: While he's capable of goofing it up on 'Saturday Night Live' and '30 Rock', serious film directors have been able to see the man behind Draper: the kind of fully formed adult not all actors grow up to be. But he is not yet the breakout star Mad Men fans think he should be. "I do this show for four months of the year. I can't live on it -I gotta keep hustling".
Hustling means taking advantage not just of the moment -but of his good fortune, too. During the last break between seasons, Hamm filmed more movies than ever before. "I went right from the show into 'The Town', working with Ben Affleck for six weeks up in Boston", he says. "Then right from that up to Canada to shoot a little part in 'Sucker Punch' with Zack Snyder, who did 'Watchmen' and '300'.
This guy is a genius-level-weird artist. It was just amazing -a-mazing- how much energy he puts into it day to day, how excited he was about it. This guy is totally inspirational, in every way. It was like, 'I'm on board ! Let's do it ! Fuck it ! Fuck, let's do it !'"
In 'The Town', which Affleck directed and stars in, Hamm plays a beleaguered Boston FBI agent chasing robbers and generally looking unshaven in a bulletproof vest. "It's almost like an old Hollywood movie", he says. "It's got a love story, it's got a crime element, but it's very much for adults. There's not a lot of candy for the Twitter-obsessed. It just deals with adult shit -no werewolves, no vampires. Yet . . . they're retooling it for 3D".
Not being an overnight success meant years of working in restaurants and hanging out with pals -but it also meant having time to think about how to approach acting as a career.
"Anything can be the next big break", Hamm says, "and you really don't know what's going to hit. You can try to be that guy who's the predictor. Or you can just say, 'I want to do this role because I really like it'. It's much more difficult to predict shit".
We finish up at Duke's and reboard the spaceship SLS. Hamm's got to get back to fire up the grill for Westfeldt and their friends, then drive to Anaheim for an all-star softball game. With the success of Mad Men and the Emmy nominations and the movie opportunities that followed, it all seems so wrapped up, so clearly destined to happen. Not so.
"If this show had been on any of the major networks", Hamm says, "I never would have been cast, ever, period, done, never, no way. They would want someone like Rob Lowe who's got a proven track record. I would've gotten all the way to the end . . . and then I wouldn't get cast".
If the thought keeps him up at night, he doesn't show it. "I would have been perfectly happy, I think, continuing my career the way it was. Just being that guy in shows. I probably could have had a very nice career doing that. And still may, honestly. The big book ain't written yet".
"Sit in Matt's chair, he's never here", Jon hamm says, pointing to Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner's director's chair.
It's a joke, of course, but it's disconcerting on a few levels. First there's the fact that Weiner is the famously hands-on guiding force of the show, so it seems wrong to touch his chair. But the thing that's really making my head tingle is the total transformation of the guy I'd driven around with the day before. He's standing on the set of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce in full Don Draper drag. Hair slicked back, gray suit on, tie bar in place, pack of fake Lucky Strikes at the ready. The metamorphosis is striking and complete, down to the way he walks, his body language, eye contact. It occurs to me that this is why Weiner keeps journalists off his sets: so nobody will realize that
the reason his cast is so good is that the "actors" are actually split-personality cases who've fully inhabited their roles.
"One of the greatest pleasures of the job", Weiner says, "has been to see Jon create the character of Don Draper. He's smart, deep, and a natural leader. I can't imagine making the show without him".
Elisabeth Moss, who plays Peggy, says the whole cast considers Hamm "the leader of our little gang. We do defer to him. If there's something that we need to fix, we go to Jon".
"It's funny", she adds.
"There definitely are a lot of similarities between how Jon and I get along and the relationship between Don and Peggy. But Jon doesn't yell at me as much -thank God. That would be a bit rough".
One odd thing about delayed recognition for an actor is that not everyone who actually knows you knows you can actually act.
"It's funny", Hamm says.
"You realize certain people didn't know I was funny because they only saw me through Mad Men -or only knew me as me and never thought I could do Mad Men. Sarah Silverman said, 'Hammy, you're good. I had no idea !'" Silverman met Hamm in 2000 through a group of friends, including Rudd, Adam Scott, and Jon Schroeder, who all played poker together.
"When I tuned in to Mad Men, I couldn't believe he was this smoldering, brooding sexual man", Silverman says. "I was like, 'Oh my God -that's Hamm !' To me, he's just this super-silly idiot.
"He's one of the very few actors who are comedian-compatible", she continues. "Not to sound elitist -I just mean he's one of us misfit toys". Silverman proves this by pointing out her minor but important contribution to Hamm's career. "Before Mad Men, he played a cable guy on my show on Comedy Central. He had one scene. On his jacket, just small enough that you can't read it on TV, it says : EATIN' ALL THE PUSSY SINCE '92".
What this late-period success means for Hamm is access. "
You get to sit at the big table with the big boys and hang out", Hamm says. "Sean Penn and Meryl Streep are having a conversation, and you're standing next to them, and they stop and turn to you and say, 'Oh God, we love your show'. Yeah, that wasn't happening with my work in 'What About Brian'".
I ask him if he feels lucky that his overnight success took as long as it did.
"Absolutely, I don't know how the 'Twilight' kids or Miley Cyrus or whoever handle it. You fuck up, make one bad decision, and people in Thailand Twitter about it". Hamm's mostly left alone, he says : "I'm old, I'm boring. I usually just duck the paparazzi. It's literally someone waiting for you to pick your nose or scratch yourself. I'm sorry, I scratched my balls -who doesn't do that ? You're really going to run that story ? What the fuck ?! Everyone has picked their nose at one point in their life too".
The subject of the next
Mad Men hiatus comes up, and Hamm seems earnestly nonchalant.
"I don't know what the alternative is", he says. "I don't have this huge, overarching plan. I don't know what I'm gonna wake up and feel like doing tomorrow, let alone five years down the line".
"I think that's enabled me to get to where I am. I certainly go after what I want. But I just have detached amusement about a lot of it. Because it's silly. This job is ridiculous. There's a line from '30 Roc'k that Tracy Morgan says that makes me laugh out loud : 'I remember that movie -I got paid one million teacher salaries'. It is what it is".
Sitting on a folding chair by the makeup trailer between scenes, Hamm tends to talk about the collaborative nature, the teamwork, of showing up and being a part of something. "This isn't a very solitary experience," he says. "You can't just go into a room and act by yourself. You need an audience to play off of, you need someone to write the material".
On cue, Elisabeth Moss, in full Peggy regalia, joins us on the folding chairs. I ask her if there's a Don Draper School of Acting.
"He doesn't say too much," Elisabeth/Peggy says sheepishly.
"Not since you stopped fucking it up and got it right", Jon/Don says, and they both crack up.
Still laughing, Hamm gets up. As he ambles toward the set, the actors' reserved parking spots come into view. The SLS, its wings tucked primly away, is shining like some golden trophy in the sun.
Hamm e-mails a couple of weeks later to say that the car's gone back to Mercedes ("the CHP has stood down"), but no matter. Whatever replaces it will suit Jon Hamm just fine. He's enjoying the ride.
