Jon Hamm Gets Back in the Driver’s Seat

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Jon Hamm knows you’ve been looking for him.

It’s a sunny spring morning and he’s seated outside for breakfast at his favorite Los Feliz restaurant—LA familiars, you know the one—where he’s seemingly on a first-name basis with every server and busboy who attends to us. Dad hat pulled low. Inconspicuous, but in plain sight. Talking, as it happens, about the notion that he’s been to the left of the spotlight for the last few years.

Jacket by Saman Amel. Shirt by Sunspel. Jeans and tie by Drake's. Belt by Brunello Cucinelli. Rings (throughout), his own.

“It’s funny, [people are] like, Where you been?” Hamm says with a chuckle. “I’ve been around. I’ve been working, man. You should see my calendar.”

If the notion of Hamm’s disappearance was greatly exaggerated before, it’s been finally, fully, officially invalidated this spring. His face adorns at least two different billboards within a two-mile radius of where he’s currently sitting; you can’t miss him. Ten years after Don Draper meditated his way to corporate synergy, Hamm is once again number one on the call sheet, in Apple TV+’s Your Friends & Neighbors, playing a character with familiar demons, but in a drastically different context. For anyone tempted to call it a comeback—and a long-overdue one at that—the actor just has one question: Comeback from where?

Landing a truly iconic role, especially on television, is a blessing that—between typecasting and overinflated expectations for future projects—can become a prison. Hamm saw this coming, and after Mad Men he took the necessary steps to defuse it—and protect his sanity in the process. Now the fruits of those efforts on his career and his mental health are coming to bloom. Yes, Jon Hamm is “back.” But also, he never left.

“I’m not an overthinker,” Hamm says with a shrug, slicing up Italian sausages and tossing some to his dog Murphy. “I generally, and genuinely, have the capacity to make a decision, feel good about the decision, and not stress. I feel comfortable when I finally come to the decision, I’m like, ‘All right, let’s do it. Let’s go.’ Full speed ahead, you know what I mean?”

When we meet, the premiere of Your Friends & Neighbors is still two weeks out. But in conversation Hamm is notably unbothered and unburdened about how his first serialized-TV lead since Mad Men will be received; he’s more stressed about hosting his first episode of SNL in years. (“I checked in with Tina Fey, [Colin] Jost, [John] Mulaney, and a couple of the other guys, like, ‘Anybody have any ideas? What are we going to do here?’” he says, casually flexing the murderers’ row of funny people on his phone he can hit for an assist.) Either this new show will do well, and perhaps shape the next five or so years of his career. Or it won’t. He understands that the outcome is beyond his control; there’s peace in that.

Watch by Cartier. Sunglasses by Oliver Peoples.

“You mitigate all the risk you can by surrounding yourself with great people. And then, let them do their work. Get out of the way. I know I’m good. I know Amanda Peet’s really good. I know Olivia Munn’s really good,” he says of his costars. “Now, I’ve had this experience, I’m sure you have too: You sit there and you stare at the fucking screen, and you go, I can watch literally anything right now on demand whenever I want and I can’t come up with something I want to watch. It’s overwhelming, right? So that’s out of your control. Marketing, will people be able to find it? Do enough people have AppleTV+? Who knows.”

As its first season draws to a close—a second season, announced before the first one even premiered, is in production now—it’s safe to say Your Friends & Neighbors has piqued a healthy amount of cultural interest. The series finds Hamm in a gear audiences are used to seeing him in: a prestige-television drama, playing a middle-aged businessman seemingly at the height of his powers and the dead center of the American Dream who suddenly comes to realize his success is an illusion and his material wins are made of smoke. Sound familiar?

The crucial twist, then, is that unlike some of Hamm’s past characters, often larger-than-life, YFAN’s Andrew Cooper is strikingly small, and drowning under a tidal wave of life changes cucking him from all sides. His wife (Peet) has taken up with one of his close friends and kicked him out of their eight-figure home, and he’s been unceremoniously fired from his high-end hedge-fund job, two circumstances that threaten to leave him cash poor, which is the very last thing you want to be in the fictional upstate New York one-percenter hamlet of Westport. Coop’s decision to start stealing from his materialistic neighbors, who are rich enough they barely notice their valuables’ absence, is less of a badass bucking of the system than a desperate attempt to reclaim some agency (and liquidity.)

It’s the kind of series where Coop can believably face mortal harm from a shady black-market art dealer in one scene, then walk in on a seemingly loving wife and mother having sex with her daughter’s college-age boyfriend in another. There are dead bodies, and also full-on interludes glorifying the luxuriousness of an Audemars Piguet watch or a $750,000 Rolls. It would’ve been a smash six-season hit on Showtime in the previous decade: a prestige production, yes, but one that’s not above shamelessly indulging in broad melodrama and all the sex, violence, and black comedy that comes with that.

On paper at least, it felt like a layup, a show custom-built to cut through the peak-TV streaming glut Hamm pointed out earlier. “It feels like we’re kind of having a moment in time where ‘rich people behaving badly’ is a bit of a genre,” Hamm says, when asked what attracted him to the series. “It’s a bedroom drama. It’s got funny elements to it. It’s dark, with a criminal element to it. It’s a little bit scary, a little bit sexy. But at the end of the day, it’s an hour-long drama about a guy whose life went sideways. Okay, that’s Breaking Bad. That’s kind of like Mad Men. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”

Sweater and shirt by Merz b. Schwanen. Shorts by Brunello Cucinelli. Watch by Jaeger Le-Coultre. Sunglasses by Tom Ford.

It’s sound business reasoning. But what about the love of the game? Why, after a decade of not chasing another TV lead role, was now the right time to lock in again?

Hamm’s career after Mad Men has been a colorful one. He flexed his considerable comedy chops (proof that sometimes God does indeed give with both hands) in some exceedingly silly roles—as the goofy cult-leader antagonist on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, as an assassin known as The Falcon in Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, and as “Jon Hamm,” asshole Method actor, on Curb Your Enthusiasm. He played heavies with varying charm-to-menace ratios in high-profile films like Baby Driver, Bad Times at the El Royale, and No Sudden Move. It was consistent, albeit a tad directionless.

“I just wanted to work,” Hamm reflects. “I knew it would be unlikely to have another experience like Mad Men. Because it was culturally defining, it was a moment in time. Everything kind of lined up for that show to be what it was at the time it was. And I was okay with that. Some people don’t even get the one. So I got one. I got all the awards I needed. [After it ended] I was like, ‘I’m good.’ I just want to work with people I find compelling. And I hope that I get to do stuff that other people like. But the only real barometer is that I like it. People were like, You should do this. You should do that. Why don’t you do this one? Because it doesn’t do it for me. I’ll go do a dumb comedy, or I’ll do three episodes of this show, or that show, or whatever.”

Still, the idea that a man of Hamm’s immense talent—who’d led what is arguably (read: unquestionably) the greatest show of all time—was seemingly so unconcerned about chasing another championship ring started to become a bit distracting. For example: As great a look as it was for Hamm to be in Top Gun: Maverick, the second-highest-grossing movie of 2022, was it also a waste, or at least a misuse, of the Hamm Effect to cast him as the joyless, authoritative boss?

“Well, that was an interesting one, because there’s no mistaking who’s the star of that movie,” Hamm says with a laugh. “I saw the original film when I was 14 years old. So I would’ve fucking made coffee on that set. My agents were like, ‘I don’t know—it’s not a very big part. Do you really want to do this?’ And I go, ‘Dude, it’s Top Gun 2. Like, what?’ That movie meant a lot to me personally. I told them, If you guys fuck this deal, you’re all fired.”

There were higher-profile roles that got away; one of the few that really stings is Gone Girl, and that was Mad Men’s fault. Hamm confirms that David Fincher reached out to him to play the part that eventually went to Ben Affleck. “I had gone in and met with Fox,” Hamm says, “and they said ‘We really want you for this. But David won’t engage unless he knows that you’re available.’ And I said, ‘Okay, let me work on that.’ Called Lionsgate, said, Hey, can we move some things around? I have this opportunity. They’re like, Absolutely. It sounds amazing. Called AMC: Yeah, for sure. Then I called the guy that ran the show, Matthew [Weiner], and he said, ‘We can’t really shoot around you.’ I was like, Yeah, I know. I’m aware. But can we maybe.… And for whatever reason, they couldn’t make it work. So it was a missed opportunity. I was very happy for [Ben]. He was amazing in the film. But yeah, that was one of those things where I’m like, I wish that would’ve worked out.”

Clothing and bow tie by Tom Ford. Shoes by Morjas. Watch by Piaget. Socks by Falke.

A younger Hamm famously put himself on a do-or-die clock to make it or give up by 30; he was 35 when he shot the Mad Men pilot. He didn’t set a similar goal after Mad Men. In true Jon Hamm fashion, he chose to just lean in to the narrative, eventually taking the piss out of the where-has-Jon-Hamm-been storyline in 2022, with a viral AppleTV+ ad that found him bored on his couch, looking at all the great TV shows existing without him.

“But now I feel like I played the long game,” he says, “and I got to this place. It’s like, now, my phone doesn’t stop ringing. It’s good.”

The winds started to change in the fall of 2023, which found Hamm dead center in the new seasons of two decidedly very mainstream series: The Morning Show, which paired him off in a steamy romantic subplot with Jennifer Aniston, and Fargo, where he notably went full villain mode, showing off a new weapon in his arsenal. Both roles netted him his first Emmy nominations since Mad Men, and, Hamm concedes, created the momentum to form the second wind narrative going into YFAN.

But Hamm also says this return to prominence had as much if not more to do with the energy he’s putting out in his personal life; interestingly, he framed the idea of leading another series as something he had to mentally be ready and willing to do again above all else.

“I’m much better at taking care of myself,” Hamm says, admitting that this was not the case during the Draper years. (In 2015, Hamm completed in-patient rehab treatment for alcohol abuse.)

“What happens is you get pulled in 52 different directions,” he says, “especially doing something like Mad Men, which was such a big moment culturally. ‘You gotta do Jimmy Fallon. You got to do this one, you got to do that one.’ There was a three-week stretch where I shot Monday through Friday on Mad Men. The weekend was Bridesmaids. Then Monday through Friday on Mad Men. The next weekend was reshoots on The Town and Bridesmaids. And then the following week was Monday through Friday on Mad Men. It was 22 days in a row, no day off, not a weekend off, nothing. And I remember going, I don’t know how I’m going to do this. And just remember saying to myself, Just concentrate on today. Look down, look up, okay, Monday’s over. Now that one’s done. Cross it off. Ten pages of dialogue in my head every day. Coming into Bridesmaids, where they’ve [already] been going for two months. Reshoots on The Town, talking with Ben, going back in time to be like, Okay, what was I doing?”

Just reflecting on that period seemed to give Hamm a shudder. “It’s like when you’re going through college, you’ve got all that work at the end of the semester. Then you get sick. Then you go home for Christmas and you want to sleep for two weeks.” Hamm says these days he prioritizes the mental reset more than he did before, looking to physical exercise between shooting days and getaways after he wraps. “Definitely, my wife and I now, whenever we finish a project, it’s like, let’s take the time. It doesn’t have to be lavish, or expensive, or three-weeks long. Let’s just go somewhere and chill and check in with each other, make sure that we’re still on the same page. That’s the kind of stuff that I’m talking about learning and doing better.”

Hamm, who turned 53 this past March, sat back pensively when asked if and how crossing fully into midlife had recontextualized things for him. “Part of 50 is, it’s a good time to check in with [yourself]. I’m a big believer in therapy. I’m in therapy right after this, in fact,” he says. “But there is something about that, contextualizing your life, because if you’re doing it right, you should be in a pretty good place by 50. It’s supercomfortable, confident. That all comes out in my work too. I mean, I think that’s a big reason why I’m having this kind of moment now, too, is whatever I’m putting out is coming from a place of feeling very good about myself and feeling very good about what I do. Not trying to be thirsty, or like, I got to do this, then I can do this, and I can do that.” You see it a lot of [actors] being like, I need to get my version of whatever the fuck. No you don’t. Just do your thing. That’s how some people’s brains work. Mine doesn’t. I mean, I’ve been doing this job for a long time, and if I look back, I don’t have regrets.”

Hamm met his wife, Anna Osceola, on the set of Mad Men—the set of the series finale, to be exact, which aired 10 years ago this month. (She’s the counselor at the New Age retreat who convinces Don to give therapy a try.) This June will make two years since their wedding. “It’s been great,” Hamm says of married life. “We were together for a few years before we got married, so we’re comfortable with each other. But getting married is a big step. It’s like anything else—if you’re in it to win it, if you want it, which I do, then that makes it easier.”

The wedding took place at the same Big Sur location where they met on the series, the same resort where Don achieves his epiphany. It’s just one of many big life moments that make it so Hamm never resents having to talk about Mad Men, even as time moves on and he promotes other projects.

“I love that people still find it relevant in some way,” Hamm says. “I love that people are still entertained by it. It’s a time capsule for me, obviously. I look back and I’m like, I’m not that young anymore. Holy shit. But I do like talking about it, because I think one of the things that sets the show apart in many ways, is that it’s like a river, you can never enter the same river twice, because everything changes. And as you grow older and you watch the show, you get different things from it too.”

Still, he’s not looking back on it wistfully. “I love thinking about that time of my life. I’m glad that it’s over. Very much glad that I’ve grown up, and aged. And I love being 50. I love everything about right now. But it’s nice to have that as a time capsule because, man, that was a fun decade. I worked my ass off. I’m proud of that work.”

Shirt by Loro Piana. Shorts by Sunspel. Watch by Jaeger Le-Coultre.

Pressed, in honor of the anniversary, about his specific memories around making the end of the show, Hamm recalls how strange and isolating it felt, because of Don’s narrative arc, to end it alone away from the cast he’d gone through this whole experience with. “A lot of that stuff from the last season I remember was very difficult to do, for many reasons. My character was going out on his kind of vision quest. And I realized, oh, shit, there’s probably going to be three or four episodes of the show that I’m not going to be working with the main cast of the show.”

He recalls shooting a scene with John Slattery, as normal as any of the duets they’d filmed together for the last 10 years, only for Weiner to announce to the set, upon wrapping, that Jon Hamm and John Slattery had just filmed their last scene together. “I’m like, What? That was it? And we both got a little emotional. And it’s a great scene, but it’s not an iconic scene—it’s just it’s the last time.”

As he reflects on the colossal legacy of past work, he’s facing the idea of trying to do it all again. But instead of feeling pressed to match the acclaim and success, he’s confident in his abilities, self-aware about his star power, and at peace with the things he can’t control.

“It has been 10 years since Mad Men went off the air. And then you go, Shit,” he says. “First of all, it’s hard to get a TV show made. It really is. So many things have to come together at the right time. It’s even harder to make it a hit. It’s even harder to get the second season. It’s even harder to get the traction, and the nominations, and the awards, and all the things that come with it. So you’ve got to really love what you’re doing—I do. But also, I’ve certainly been around long enough that my presence is value added for a lot of that. Not just from the studio or the network or whatever, to make it, but to actually draw an audience. People are like, I like that dude. I look good on a billboard, man.”

PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographed by Morgan Maher
Styled by Karolyn Pho
Grooming by Kim Verbeck at The Wall Group
Tailored by Yelena Travkina
Produced by John Morrow
Special thanks to Mulholland Tennis Club