Jon Hamm

With its rock-scaped walls and leather booths, the 101 Coffee Shop, a retro-style diner in Hollywood, could be straight out of the Mad Men set, save for the guys in frayed caps and ironic tees, the yoga dudes all waxed and pedicured, and the emo-dads cutting pancakes for their faux-hawked toddlers. Enter Jon Hamm, twirling his car keys: a man among boys.

Let’s dispense with the looks first: Hamm, 38 and 6'2", is astronaut-handsome, with the chiseled profile of a gleaming ’63 Cadillac. Tina Fey has joked that his beauty burns so bright, she had to “poke a hole in a paper plate and look at him like an eclipse.” His friend Sarah Silverman coos over the St. Louis native’s “Midwestern farm yumminess.” In a brown plaid shirt and jeans, Hamm is sporting stubble and a damp brown forelock, which on the show is impeccably Brylcreemed back (his hair’s still lush as a beaver’s coat, though it’s thinning, he says, “the way of all flesh”). At 10 a.m., he’s mildly red-eyed and face-creased—wear and tear you’d never see on his slick yet haunted ad man Don Draper, even the morning after Draper has guzzled a quart of bourbon and crashed his car with a woman not his wife (season 2, episode 5).

Hamm is three weeks into a “murderous” shooting schedule for season 3 of Mad Men, the cult AMC drama about Madison Avenue in its 1960s heyday, which returned on August 16. Draper is an advertising creative director with a Grace Kelly wife, a punch card of mistresses, and a mysterious past, and Hamm plays him with intimidating verbal parsimony and confidence, which earned him a Golden Globe last year. During his 10 months off from the series, he played Fey’s puppyish, cake-baking doctor boyfriend on 30 Rock and hosted Saturday Night Live (the highlight: a skit called “Jon Hamm’s John Ham,” in which the actor gamely hawks a roll of deli meat designed to be eaten while on the can). For Mad Men fans, Hamm’s comedic persona—Steve Martin–ish in its bushy-tailed, goofy physicality—was both jarring and oddly thrilling.

“Inside the face of a matinee idol lurks a full-on comedy nerd,” says John Slattery, who plays Mad Men’s agency partner Roger Sterling. Indeed, many of his closest pals are comic royalty—Silverman, Zach Galifianakis, Paul Rudd—whom he’s known since arriving in L.A. nearly 15 years ago, when they all haunted the comedy club underground. “I watch Mad Men and I cannot fucking believe that’s Jon,” Silverman says. “Suddenly you see him as this sexy, brooding person, and this is the same guy who, like, played a cable guy on [The Sarah Silverman Program], wearing a patch on his uniform in words just small enough so you can’t see it saying: ‘Eating all the pussy since ’93.’ He has that ridiculous sense of humor that we like to employ, a chasing-the-giggle kind of fun that’s dark and weird.”

“Dark and weird” aptly characterizes Draper—who, having assumed the identity of a dead fellow Korean War soldier to escape the torment of his abusive upbringing, negotiates his fraudulence by boozing, having affairs, and avoiding conversation. But Hamm’s incredible feat is that for all of Draper’s roguish, morally ambiguous behavior, you root for him.

“Come on, he’s their dad. Women love their daddies,” Hamm says. Okay, maybe he’s the idealized version we wished for, but there’s a magnetism and depth in Draper’s restraint, especially in this age of Apatovian beta-males who wear their neuroses as conspicuously as their beer guts. “A lot of people can’t stand silence. They give away so much information,” Hamm observes. “This guy gives away nothing.”

Matthew Weiner, who created and writes the show (he also wrote for The Sopranos), tested more than 80 actors for the role but pushed to cast Hamm, a relative unknown. “He’s the only person who really had this great mix of empathy and masculinity and intelligence,” Weiner says. “Both Don and Jon have an inner life. So long as you have that kind of depth in a human being, people will root for him…. Jon walked out of the room and I said, ‘That guy has lived.’ ”

Indeed, Hamm’s parents divorced when he was two, and then when he was 10, his mother died suddenly of stomach cancer. He moved in with his dad and his stepsisters (his father’s first wife had also died), though he has said he was raised largely by friends’ mothers. The actress Sarah Clarke (Trust Me, Twilight), whose mom was among them (Clarke was also his prom date), recalls that Hamm “was really quite wise at a very early age…. He didn’t wear on his sleeve what he was going through, but there was a profundity about him.… He was someone you could talk to about stuff in a different way.”

Hamm talks a lot about his high school years at John Burroughs, a private school in St. Louis, clearly a refuge for him. He was, unusually, both a drama kid and a jock, playing Judas in Godspell and middle linebacker on the football team. “For a kid who’s lost his mom and all the rage and grief that no one was able to talk out of me, football was a very therapeutic sport. Very,” Hamm says.

He was only 20 and in college when his father died of diabetes and general poor health. Dan Hamm, who ran the family trucking business, is a touchstone for Don Draper: “He was a big guy, a smart and fun guy, but also sad,” Hamm recalls. “I remember opening my dad’s closet and there were, like, 40 suits, every color of the rainbow, plaid and winter and summer. He had two jewelry boxes full of watches and lighters and cuff links. And just…he was that guy. He was probably unfulfilled in his life in many ways.” At such a pause, Draper might light a Lucky Strike; Hamm swigs his coffee, his third of five (he quit smoking years ago).

After graduating from the University of Missouri, where he clocked 15 plays in two years on a drama scholarship, he returned to Burroughs to teach acting—“I wanted to give something back, as hokey as that sounds”—before packing up his Corolla and driving out to Hollywood. There he moved in with a clutch of struggling actors (including Rudd, a friend of Clarke’s) in a run-down rental. “I was a little intimidated because he’s really good at everything,” Rudd recalls. “He’s like one of those guys, who’s really very smart, funny, and athletic, and he’s also very handsome. All of these things would make someone quite hate-able in my mind, but it was really the opposite. What forged our friendship is that sense of humor.”

Which must have come in handy, because over three years of “hustling and scrambling” Hamm didn’t land a single role. “I came in the Dawson’s Creek era; it was all about tiny guys who looked like teenagers, and I haven’t looked like a teenager ever,” he says. “So I was, like, auditioning to be their dads. At 25.” His low point came when a college friend offered him her job as a set dresser on a soft-core porn film. “I’m, like, $150 a day? I will totally do that…. But it was soul-crushingly depressing. There was no actual fucking, but it was so sad; the actors were dead but they were trying their best. I was like, Man, this can’t fucking be it.”

Help came in the form of a phone call from the actress Jennifer Westfeldt, a friend of a friend, who was casting a play she’d written. (It was the basis for the acclaimed indie film Kissing Jessica Stein starring Westfeldt; Hamm had a bit part.) The two started dating, while Hamm found steady if not
career-making work mostly playing firemen and detectives on shows such as Providence and The Division. The couple has been together ever since, a dozen years.

Their unmarried state still arouses curiosity in 2009, and Hamm is clearly tired of defending it: “It couldn’t be a simpler answer. Marriage doesn’t really mean anything to me. I feel like in many ways marriage is more for the families [of the couple] than for the people involved, so I don’t gravitate to it. But I’ve also said that the minute Jen is like, ‘You need to marry me,’ I’ll be like, ‘All right!’ We are both on the same page. Although that may shift; I don’t know. I don’t need to be married, but I feel married.”

There’s a certain irony in his stance, given how Don and Betty Draper present a snapshot of marriage on the cusp of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which torpedoed the kind of tense contract the couple had sworn to uphold. Today, of course, things are fairer between the sexes, but not necessarily easier. “Back then…there were fewer questions about whose role was what. Now it’s this kind of weird negotiation. It’s certainly better in more ways than it’s worse, but there is a little nostalgia for that,” Hamm observes. “I think it makes it easier to be a cuckold when you have your role set up for you. You get guys who are emasculated and feel bummed out, who want to be the breadwinner, the decision maker.”

The male-female power continuum may be especially tough in the Hollywood fishbowl because success, when it hits, is writ so large. The industry is notoriously stingy toward women past their twenties, and Westfeldt’s career hit a speed bump just as Hamm’s was taking off (Mad Men springboarded him into movie roles including 2008’s The Day the Earth Stood Still and a supporting part in the upcoming indie Howl, about Allen Ginsberg’s obscenity trial). “It’s incredibly complicated,” Hamm says, about equilibrating a relationship. “In many ways, when Jen and I met, the situation was reversed. But it’s all about how you deal with it day to day…. A rising tide lifts all boats. You want to be like, ‘Jump on my back and let’s go!’ rather than, ‘I made it!’ and then pull the rope up behind you and say, ‘Sorry!’ ” Recently, the couple started a production company together.

Tracing a line from Don to Jon, then, what you get is no less than the evolution of the modern male. Don Draper was The Man in 1963; what makes a man today? Hamm seems a damn good specimen. He’s unfailingly polite, offering to pick up the tab and drive me to my hotel to save me a taxi trip. He eschews the gym—“I’m not gay, and I’m not a superhero”—in favor of basketball, softball, tennis, and golf. John Slattery reveals that “he was a piano prodigy when he was a kid. He’s very modest about it. Get him drunk at a party sometime and he’ll show you.” He likes “booze” (he too is a bourbon man) and his new Audi S5, his only splurge since he began earning real money. He appreciates nice clothes, though he deplores how his peers dress like post-pubescent hipsters. “I’m, like, Come on, man, you’re 40, you have kids, what are you doing? Unless you’re Brian Grazer, that’s no one’s look.” He’s persistently loyal to his longtime friends and his girlfriend. “I’m not a cheater. I’ve never cheated in my life,” he says. He’s worked his ass off to get where he is, embraces the virtue of honest labor, and is confounded by the fame showered on overnight tabloid stars. “Spencer Pratt and Heidi Whatever—I’m sorry, they don’t deserve it. They haven’t done anything, and they are celebrated for nothingness.”

The main tension of Mad Men is that Draper desperately wants a piece of the happiness he sells, but he can’t access it. Hamm, however, seems to have found his. “I’ve lived on couches, in friends’ basements. The idea of having any place of my own is really remarkable,” he says, sounding genuinely gobsmacked by his life. “I get really warm and happy and, like, Oh my God, I can’t believe that this is our place. Jen and I had a moment like that last night—we were sitting in front of the fireplace with our dog, and I was like, How nice is this? How nice is this? And the answer is: very.”