Jon Hamm on being Don Draper and Mad Men series five

He’s as handsome as hell, no argument. He is morally questionable but mysterious, intriguing, compelling. He’s a coward who has chutzpah. He’s brilliant at what he does, partly because of his instinctive understanding of what makes people tick, but seemingly incapable of correcting his own psychological flaws. He drinks way too many martinis and smokes countless packs of cigarettes. His suits are never shabby, unlike the way he treats his women, of whom there are many. He is, of course, Don Draper.

Fans

The character is more of a household name than the actor, Jon Hamm, who plays him. But the legion of Mad Men’s female fans should not make the mistake of confusing The Don with The Jon. As Hamm himself acknowledges at a Bafta event, after being interviewed by Jo Whiley (cleverly dressed in the shortest skirt and highest heels ever, meaning her interviewee gallantly had to hold her arm as she negotiated the stairs), when he says he is the antithesis of Don Draper.

Now, we have to ask ourselves, is this a good thing? As I sit facing the actor in a room in a fashionable Soho hotel, I’m in two minds. At the Bafta event, Hamm had – dare I say it, hammed it up for his female fans – or at least catered to our Mad Men mania for Draper’s sharp suits, slick black hair and crisp white shirts.

But today Hamm is dressed down in a perfectly nice shirt and trousers and is so relaxed he is in his socks, a pair of hulking black Doc Marten boots standing to attention by the sofa. His eyes are pink-rimmed and rather bloodshot – he flew in the previous day from LA and is showing the effects of jetlag and, I would guess, a fair bit of partying at the Bafta bash the previous night.

Sweet

He has good manners, padding over to the bar to get me a glass of water and, rather sweetly, pretends to be excited as I strip off layers of clothing. “Well, hello-oh…” He has a bedroom voice – a very chilled, deep, long, lazy drawl – if not, today, bedroom eyes. He raises his eyebrow in an arch way – which I don’t recall him doing as Don, does he? “I don’t know, maybe?”

First things first, is it true – as John Slattery (who plays Roger Sterling, his partner in the ad agency) has claimed – that you wear a girdle in Mad Men. “No,” Hamm says, not exactly cracking up. “He also says I play concert piano.” Well, that would be cool. “It would, if it were true.” Hamm, who is mad about comedy, has often said that he envies his co-star’s one-liners. There’s even a spin-off book: Sterling’s Gold: Wit and Wisdom of an Ad Man.

We do a bit of a round-up of where we are with Mad Men, as we are about to get the fifth series, with another two in the pipeline. “Don has come through a significantly difficult period in his life. His previous marriage – to Betty – has utterly disintegrated because of his wife finding out the secrets he has been keeping. I’m in my poky little flat – and for a man in his late 30s, it’s depressing, and he has gone through a significant period of depression and come out of it.”

Likeable

We talk about the importance (or not) of likeablity in a character. This is a propos of Don telling his colleague Pete Campbell that he will never succeed in advertising because no one likes him, and in the industry being liked is more important than being effective. “That is probably more true in business than in television. I think that sometimes unlikeability or dislikeability, if that’s a word, is more compelling in a dramatic sensibility. Just think about Tony Soprano…” I love Tony Soprano! “But he’s a terrible person.”

Hamm played another “douche-bag”, as he has put it, in the hit comedy Bridesmaids, co-written and starring Kristen Wiig. His role is to be her ‘f***-buddy’ (he, charmingly, makes it clear that she is way down his list – maybe, at three or four), and there are a lot of comic sound effects around the bedroom. The sex scenes reminded me of the absurdly frantic rumpy-pumpy action in The Kids Are All Right, also co-written by a woman, Lisa Cholodenko, as well as directed by her.

Hamm thinks that the gender of the people writing and directing makes no difference. His long-term partner, Jennifer Westfeldt, is an actress and co-wrote the hit indy film, Kissing Jessica Stein and is set to appear alongside Hamm for the first time in Friends with Kids which she has wrote and directed. He believes that in a comedy, the sex has to be comical, regardless. And in real life, does he think sex is funny? “Of course! At a certain point, there’s legs and there’s body parts and it has the opportunity to be very funny.”

Comedy

Hamm met Kristen Wiig on Saturday Night Live, where she is a regular, and together they co-hosted the show on a number of occasions and created their own sketches. He has also played the love interest of Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon in 30 Rock. It’s a little bit unexpected that he is so interested in being funny, when the character he’s best-known for can barely summon a smile, let alone a laugh. When I comment on this being rather appealing, he says: “I like being smart, honestly. I’m very proud of being intelligent and being… witty, I guess is a better word. In fact, I was talking with Stephen Fry last night, who I absolutely adore and have for a long time, and Hugh Laurie, too.”

I ask him about Brad Pitt who was also at the Bafta party, “Now he can sell some magazines!” – but I’m sure he must be adorable, too? “Well, we’re both from Missouri, I’ll put it that way.”

Hamm was brought up in St Louis – a place he speaks about with affection – by his mother, who died of cancer when she was young. He describes her as profoundly Catholic (and himself, as non-religious). “I do remember her dying, but I don’t think anything sustains you through that. I think it just sucks. It must be terrible to die, especially at 35 with a nine-year-old child.”

He went to live with his father who had two children from a previous marriage and owned a trucking company. He remembers parties that seemed to rival Mad Men dos or the dysfunctional couplings of The Ice Storm. “There was certainly an aspect of that, but I was a child who didn’t have anything other than a tangential, kind of ephemeral relationship to it.”

Orphaned

I remind Hamm that he’d said something about working out the maths after his father died (of complications from diabetes, when Jon was barely 20) with some suggestion that there had been affairs. There are no love children scattered around, are there? Hamm’s eyebrow rises. “Not that I know of, but part of living a life is knowing that there are things that happened that you didn’t know about when you were a child, and some of the sadness of losing a parent is knowing that you are never going to have those conversations.” As he says, he was an orphan at 20 and it definitely hit him hard: “You very much feel like you’re adrift and so you do drift away in a certain sense…” I had read some- where that such was the sense of community in his hometown, and the concern on the part of his friends’ parents, that he was pulled back from whatever difficulties he was getting into. “In a deeper sense, it was partly the school that I went to [which he loved so much, he went back there to teach acting and public speaking for a while]. We had a close-knit community and part of being in a community is having people that notice and that care. And when my father passed away, there was this safety net that materialised.”

When he was growing up, Hamm describes himself as “a weird little kid. I would read things like The Almanac and the dictionary and I had these little books full of puzzles and it was always about finding the solutions.” He’s still interested in mathematics because, “it’s something that is exact, precise and knowable. And in the world of art, there is no precise and knowable. I do really enjoy it. I like coming up with the answer.”

Looks

Did he realise he was good looking before he was Don Draper? “No, I mean, it’s, no, who thinks of themselves as good looking, honestly? Seriously, who, who? I… I can’t say that at all.” Oh come on, Jon – you must have heard it a hundred times. “I’ve certainly heard it and it feels much better to be described that way than for someone to say, like, ‘by the way, you’re hideous’. But it’s so subjective and, at the end of the day, really meaningless.”

How does Jennifer cope with all that sort of attention aimed at you? “She sees me every day and she sees me in the morning so she realises that it’s a ton of horses**t.”

We talk about his life waiting tables in Los Angeles. It was Jennifer who gave him a break in a play she was directing. Were you a good waiter? “I was.” Did you get a lot of tips? “Sure.”

He used to spend one day a week working for a charity called Project Angel Food that delivered food to homebound Aids patients and other ill people. “It was something I looked forward to doing because at the end of the week, at least I had done that – and obviously there was no payment. And especially being an unemployed actor, where you say ‘Oh poor me’ – you got a real sense of what ‘Poor me’ really is.”

He looks back at that time with some affection, “I don’t know if it was fun but it was just life, and you get by the only way you can which is, hey, if you’ve got to get to work you take the bus. [Hamm famously didn’t have a car in LA] It gets you there and back. Takes a little while. But you know, we were all there struggling at one point and it’s amazing to have come through it and have this experience now, where we can go, ‘Oh, this is a little better!’”

Hamm wants to continue but his personal assistant is putting her foot down. He’s telling me that he doesn’t think Don will have an affair with copywriter Peggy (played by Elizabeth Moss), and he’s not really interested in discussing the possible permutations of Don and Joan (Christina Hendricks) but he would like to come over, like Moss, and do a play in London.

Ooops – it really is time to go. He reaches over to shake a hand and purrs, “Darling… we’ll do it again some time…”

Radio Times