Jon Hamm on starting out as an actor, on-set injuries and Mad Men

September 4, 2009 by Lance Carter

When did you start acting? Were you pretty young?

You know, kind of. My first acting job, so the story goes, was in first grade. I was picked by my teacher to be Winnie the Pooh in our first-grade production of Winnie the Pooh—back when, you know, public school programs still had things like productions of Winnie the Pooh, and music programs and recess and things like that.

Jumping ahead a bit, or a lot, what was your first acting job after you moved to L.A.?

The first job I got was a one-episode thing on Providence where I played this sort of bartender. It was a Halloween party and I had a costume. I dressed up as Zorro. I was sort of a…

A love interest?

Yeah, for the younger sister. But what I didn’t know was that the star of the show [Melina Kanakaredes] had gotten pregnant and they were running out of lenses to shoot her with and things for her to hold in front of her. So they had to kind of beef up everybody’s storyline, and I was available. They ended up bringing my guy back for 17 or 18 more episodes. And after that, I got a little part in a movie and another couple of little parts in TV shows and pilots and this and that and the other. And I was able to, about a year after that, quit my day job and focus on it full time.

What was the day job?

Waiting tables. I mean, I’ve probably been a waiter longer than I’ve really been anything else. Or I’m probably coming up on even. But barely. I quit waiting tables when I was 29. [He’s currently 38.]

Tell me about getting cast on Mad Men.

I had a horrible pilot season that year and one of the last ones to come down the pike was Mad Men. I looked at it and I was like, AMC? They don’t even make television shows—what is this going to be? But the script was really interesting, and we did it. And as I’ve said many, many times before, I was on the bottom of everybody’s list. Like, I started at the very bottom. But to Matt Weiner’s great credit, he was very tenacious in fighting for me.

Tell me about your take on Don. One thing that’s interesting to me is that while on the surface it might look like he’s amoral, he really does have a moral code—it’s just complicated.

You know, as much as Don makes bad decisions and is sort of dubious in his motivations a lot of times, he does have a moral center that is specific and real. He’s fiercely loyal to people that he feels deserve it and less so to people that don’t. He’s confused and he’s confusing, and yet, he has to project this sort of ultimate confidence. And those juxtapositions and dichotomies, I think, are what make the show a lot different than most. You always know Jack Bauer’s going to do the right thing. He’ll kill a couple of guys, but they were bad guys, all of them—they deserved it. There’s really never any gray area. He’s a superhero. And that’s taking nothing away from that show or Kiefer’s performance. He’s amazing. The fact that he does that day in and day out for 24 episodes a year, for six seasons now—the guy deserves a fucking medal. I mean, I don’t know how he stands up. But ours is a different sort of way of telling a story. And I like playing this character. I like going to work. I like telling the story. And, you know, we don’t get a lot of advance warning. Matt doesn’t tell us what’s happening [with the story going forward]. He’s very secretive. But I kind of like not knowing.

Does it help in the performance, not knowing where the story is ultimately going?

Sure. I mean, no one knows where you’re going in life. We could walk out the door, get hit by a car tomorrow. But every week we get to read another chapter of this awesome story. So it’s exciting.

So you’re as surprised as I am when I watch it on TV and all of a sudden you’re tying up Bobby Barrett in bed?

Whoever it is —it’s usually me and Slattery—but we’ll get the scripts and immediately start texting each other, “Did you read this fucking script? What a script, holy shit.” The episode “The Jet Set,” when we read that, it was like, what in the fuck is going on here?

When you took the part, did you do any research into the period or into advertising?

The only real research I did was books, literature, film from that era. And I had a kind of a working knowledge of what that guy was like through my father, who was a businessman. We had a family trucking company based in St. Louis from the turn of the century. And I would look at pictures of my dad in 1950, 1960. He was a big guy. And [the image] was that kind of stuff. I mean, it was whatever club he belonged to—Missouri Athletic Club in St. Louis—and the Shriners and suits and all the gear and all the cufflinks. My dad had jewelry boxes full of watches and cufflinks and just like this detritus.

I heard you’ve had a couple of injuries on set.

It’s funny because I just came from my cast physical, which is this thing you have to do every year so that you won’t drop dead. You have to fill out all this shit that happened to you in the last couple of years. And the lady was, like, “Jesus, does the show have a lot of stunts? I don’t remember a lot of stunts in this show.” I was like, “No, no.” But I had two injuries, both in the first season. A piece of the set fell and hit me on the head in the conference room. We’re all sitting around the big table, and a big, like 10-foot section of wall hit me right on top of the head. Of all the people sitting at this huge table. And so that cracked my head open pretty good.

It really split your head?

Oh, yeah, it was a pretty big cut. Head wounds, I gather, are bleeders. I was like, “Oh, shit! What the fuck happened?” And everybody was like, uh uh uh. I started taking my jacket off, making sure it didn’t get blood on it.

Wow, that was unnecessarily responsible of you.

Well, I was more mad than anything, really. I wasn’t really hurt. It was just a smack on the head. But the other one was in the flashback to Korea where we find out this guy dies and I switch identities with him. And I had a stunt to do where I sort of jump with three cameras on my face and land on this pad, with an explosion behind me. Okay. Nothing I haven’t done many times in my life: I have to jump and land on a pad.

You’ve done a lot of stunt work before?

Well, yeah. I mean, I’m not going to do a wheelie on a motorcycle at 80 miles per hour. But jumping and landing on a pad, I’m good to go. And sure as shit, in rehearsal I land on the pad, and for some reason, I don’t slide so much as my hand kind of catches and this bone just snaps. I heard it. And it hurt, but I was like, doesn’t feel broken—it should be okay. It’ll be fine. That was the rehearsal. So now I have to do this twice more. So then I’m trying to land not on my hand. But then I hurt this shoulder. And I was like, Just shoot this fucking thing already.

Did the crew know, or did you keep it to yourself?

After we shot it, I came up to the director and producer, and I was like, “I’m pretty sure I broke my hand on that.” And they’re like, “What? Really?” And I held up my hand, and by that point it was totally swollen. They were like, “Oh, my God. Get some ice.” So it was fine. We just finished the day. There wasn’t much else to do. I went the next day and got a cast put on, took a bunch of Vicodin.

But now you had a cast on, and you have a very tight shooting schedule. Did that mess everything up?

There was one scene where I’m wearing the cast. I have a newspaper on my lap. Somebody comes in my office, and I put the newspaper down [to cover the cast], and I’m like, “What? What do you want?” So we shot that. Then I went to the doctor and they cut it off and put a removable cast on. But then the scene where I promote Elisabeth Moss [playing Peggy Olson] to copywriter, we rehearse it, and I say, “Lizzie, I broke my hand. I don’t have the cast on it now, obviously, because I’m shooting this. So please—I’ll shake your hand, but don’t shake. You know, fake it a little bit.” So we shoot—we do a rehearsal, and Pete says, “Well, we don’t have any copywriters.” I say, “Well, hold on. Peggy, come in here. You’re now promoted to junior copywriter. Your first thing is going to be working with Pete.” And she’s like, “Oh, my gosh. Thank you so much.” And I say, “You’re welcome.” And she… [Hamm pantomimes an extraordinarily firm handshake.] It was just like lightning bolts of pain, like I was almost driven to my knees. And she let go, and she was like, “Oh, my God! What did I do? What did I do?” I was like, “I told you not to shake my hand.” She was like, “I thought you were kidding.” [Laughs.] Like what kind of joke would that be? Like, oh, it was going to be hilarious, a fake handshake. But I’ve since avoided any other injuries, so God bless