As we ascend the trail into Griffith Park in Los Angeles, Jon Hamm gazes up at the scrubby ridge to our left. From our perspective, the ridge line traces a clean horizon, uninterrupted by cell towers or midcentury modern palaces. He nods toward a man sitting up there alone.
“See that dude sitting on the point there?” he asks. I look: The dude could have been meditating or having a Don Draper moment, dreaming up the next big Coca-Cola campaign.
For Hamm, the image of the man brought him back to 2017, when he first moved to the Hollywood Hills. His career-making, Emmy-winning role as Draper in the AMC drama Mad Men had ended two years before, as had a romantic partnership of 18 years. It had been by most accounts, including his, a tough period of transition.
“I was newly single – I was like, I just need to concentrate on myself again,” he recalls with some apparent wistfulness. “And I would just take this walk, every day,” to the top of that ridge, and then back toward his house, memorising lines along the way.
Eventually he began to settle into his new home, his new neighbourhood, his new rhythm. He turned a corner, pushed ahead.
We met up that sunny late-February afternoon, along with Hamm’s beloved rescue dog, Murphy, to hike and talk about his new Apple TV+ drama, Your Friends & Neighbors, his first lead TV role since playing Draper a decade earlier.
Draper, a brilliant and enigmatic ad executive, had been singular, a defining character not only for Hamm but also in the pantheon of anti-heroes from prestige TV’s golden age.
It is also a role that Hamm (54) spent the years just after Mad Men trying in some ways to cast off. In those days, the ones that sent him wandering Griffith Park, success after Draper hardly seemed assured. Articles from that time bore headlines like Jon Hamm’s Second Act, So, What Now, Jon? and Jon Hamm Is Ready to Break Free From Don Draper.
“It doesn’t matter how awesome or successful or genre-defining, career-defining” a thing is, he says. “As soon as it’s over, everyone’s like, What’s next?”
What came next for Hamm was largely a series of quirky guest roles and supporting roles on TV and a run of movies that reaped decidedly mixed results, the upshot being that there weren’t many headlines of any sort for a while. But it seems obvious now that however one defines Hamm’s second act, he is easing into a third. It is an act defined so far by a string of high-profile TV roles (Fargo, Landman, The Morning Show); by an invitation to introduce the Kansas City Chiefs at Super Bowl LIX; and by his first Saturday Night Live hosting gig in 15 years, airing last weekend. Suddenly, he is everywhere again.
He also feels freer now to play with that Draper-like persona, he says. (Witness his Mad Men spoof with his former costar John Slattery in Unfrosted last year, in which they propose rebranding Pop Tarts as Jelle Jolie.) Hamm’s new series, which premiered on Friday, is in some ways a return to the themes, style and wardrobe that made him famous. As the slick hedge funder Andrew Cooper, his character seems at least partly predicated on viewers’ memories of Draper.
“There’s something to be said for that,” Hamm, who is also an executive producer, acknowledges. “There’s also something to be said for subverting that.” Your Friends & Neighbors is ultimately a crime caper and a critique of conspicuous consumption. As Hamm puts it, “Don was a seller, and Coop is a buyer.”
Perhaps most important, this is the act in which Hamm became a happily married man, at peace with where he is, with his past, his inner critic – a peace, he says, that he has begun to find in only the past five years.
Still, as Draper once said: “People tell you who they are, but we ignore it because we want them to be who we want them to be,” and something about Hamm seems to invite such projection. Whatever that ineffable quality is, it is more than handsomeness. Jennifer Aniston, his Morning Show costar, says he was “covered in fairy dust”. Fargo creator Noah Hawley noted “the mystery of what you can’t see,” which makes people “want to keep watching”.
If you ever find yourself hiking with Jon Hamm, expect a lot of questions from friends, family and colleagues afterward. They will want to know what he is like. A surprising number of otherwise sober-minded people will want to know whether he was wearing shorts (he was) and what kind they were (loose, athletic). Such is the effect the mere idea of Jon Hamm’s shorts has on people’s imaginations.
Plenty of actors are handsome. Hamm has a slightly old-school, barrel-chested masculinity that, unlike much of what passes for manliness in the manosphere age, is also funny and self-deprecating, with an air of cultivated detachment. You believe him in a cowboy hat. You believe him in reading glasses.
“You can go deep with Jon – like, we’ve shared some tears, in a good way,” says Aniston, whose character in The Morning Show, which she executive produces, gets into a romantic affair with Hamm’s character in season three. “So he’s also a really good listener, and a great communicator.”
Amanda Peet, who plays Cooper’s still very present ex-wife in Your Friends & Neighbors, joked about Hamm’s tendency to vex even assured men like her husband, the writer and producer David Benioff (Game of Thrones).
“I’ve worked with Ben Affleck, Mark Ruffalo, Ethan Hawke, John Cusack, Ashton Kutcher, and like, my husband is not the jealous type – he would barely bat an eyelid,” she says. “But by the time the fourth friend of ours was like, ‘How are you doing with her working with Jon Hamm?,’ he started to be like, ‘What the [expletive]?‘”
Some men might prefer Hamm to be a bad guy. Unfortunately for them, he does not seem to be a bad guy. For one thing, he loves his dog. He shares pictures of Murphy on set. He shares pictures of Murphy when you’re already hanging out with Murphy.
He’ll interrupt himself mid-sentence just to make a quick observation in Murphy-voice, from Murphy’s POV. (“This is pretty good dirt,” went one voice-over. “This is really good, guys, I dunno if you’ve tried this dirt.”) Like many pups, Murphy, an 85-pound bulldog mix, functions as an avatar of his owner – he too is a friendly, bull-necked orphan who has risen to the Hollywood Hills.
“I see about 15 pictures of Murphy every day,” Peet says. “It’s like right on the line between endearing and psychotic.”
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Hamm calls you “buddy” and says things like “holy cow” and “cool beans”. The Mad Men creator, Matthew Weiner, who first praised him as a great and thoughtful actor and “a very artistic person,” also says this: “He would like to be seen, himself, as a nerd, I think. And he is nerdy. But he is also a jock.”
Historically, there are reasons for Hamm’s fans to assume he is existentially conflicted. Draper’s darkness was irresistible, deeply literary and steeped in manly trauma, and that is part of it. But there is also Hamm’s biography: he lost his mother at 10, and then his father at 20. More than most, he had to summon the wherewithal to succeed on his own.
“I was a late bloomer in every sense,” he says. “As my therapist would say, I’ve always been kind of surviving, and only in the last 20 years or so have I been able to really participate in life in the way that my friends that had normal adolescences growing up [could].” He worked various jobs beginning at age 16, including as a teacher after college, and moved to Los Angeles at 24.
“If you wanted something, get a [expletive] job and go get it, go do it,” he says.
Unlike many people with humble origins, Hamm rarely lacked confidence, says Robert Lawson, a friend since high school. It helped that Hamm was good-looking, played football. It helped that friends and other families supported him, particularly after his father died.
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Success with Mad Men came relatively late, in Hamm’s mid-30s, and it was incandescent. Suddenly the paparazzi were always parked outside his house and shining lights in his face as he exited a restaurant or bar.
As Mad Men ended, in 2015, there were signs of strain. A cascade of difficulties swamped his personal life: He separated from his long-time partner, actor and screenwriter Jennifer Westfeldt; he went to rehab for alcohol addiction; an old fraternity hazing episode, in which the victim needed medical treatment, was resurfaced by reporters. (Hamm was charged with hazing but ultimately not convicted.)
“It’s like anything else, there’s no way over but through, right?” he says in a later video call about the challenges of that time. “You can avoid it, or you cannot deal with it, but it doesn’t make it go away. You have to kind of go through the steps.”
But he worked hard, meanwhile, not to be typecast. He turned down roles that seemed too Draper-like and avoided working with other Mad Men alumni. He did thrillers (Baby Driver, Beirut). He did more comedy, a lot of it (Confess, Fletch, 30 Rock, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt).
His attempts to become a go-to leading man in the movies met middling box-office success. “Does that say that the audience doesn’t want to see me in movies?” he says. “I don’t know; I don’t think so. I think that there’s so many other things that go into it.” But he established his range and comedic bona fides, and he landed roles in some of the biggest movies around, like Top Gun: Maverick.
The work was varied and steady. A few years after moving to the hills, he began a relationship in earnest with actor Anna Osceola, now his wife, whom he had met while taping the final Mad Men episode – the one with Draper’s Coca-Cola meditation. His new house became a home. Hamm doesn’t have children, but he says he hopes for them – a good sign he wasn’t bluffing on the whole happiness thing.
Those who know him well attest to his newfound contentment, to the progress he has made since the period when Mad Men was ending – “a really tough time,” as Lawson described it.
“Drinking with Jon Hamm during those days was different from having a drink with Jon Hamm now,” he says. “He definitely has come out on the other side,” he says, “and I think meeting Anna was such a great thing. He is as happy as I have ever seen him.” (Hamm does still have the occasional drink and says people often wrongly assume that “I’m off the wagon” because of his short rehab stint. “I’ve never claimed to be a sober person,” he says.)
As his costar in Mad Men, Slattery saw first-hand “the real rocket ride” Hamm was on for a while. As his friend, he sees where he is now.
“He just makes sound decisions, despite whatever pressures may have been applied externally and internally,” he says. “I’m just happy that he’s in the place he’s in.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
