Jon Hamm gave an extensive interview to The Guardian (UK) this week, and as always, he’s a great interview. He talks extensively about Mad Men (the Brits are obsessed with the show, maybe even more than Americans), about his film The Town (where he’s lovely) and about his own history of depression. The full Guardian piece is here – it’s lengthy and full of fan-girl praise. The Hamm gently touches the interviewer because she had some coffee on her arm, and she pretty much orgasms right there. As we all would, I don’t blame her. So I’ll just do the highlights:

The Hamm on The Draper: “Oh, that man who literally, at his fundament, is not who he says he is!” says Hamm of Draper. “Who struggles with fundamental dissatisfaction, with a desire to be better or understood or different in some way…” While wearing suits of devastating sharpness? “Ha! Right!”

On his FBI Agent character in The Town: “Part of what’s exciting about playing this guy is that this is a guy whose moral compass is very much aligned. He’s a guy who knows what is right and what is wrong, and there are grey areas in his world, but his day-to-day job is a very simple equation: there are people who do bad things, and his job is to stop them from doing bad things or to catch them and put them away after they’ve done bad things. It was nice to play a person who doesn’t live in those grey areas.” But you play the grey areas so well, I say. “Ha ha! Thank you. But it was also… not set in the 60s, and I’d had, like, 15 scripts to play guys who…” Were rather… Donnish? “A little bit of that.”

On later-in-life success: “It’s nice not to have to worry about how you’re going to pay your bills. And it’s a problem I’ve had for far longer than I haven’t had it. Not worrying about the bills is still very new for me.”

On acting, rejection and ambition: “I don’t think anyone puts themselves through the indignity and humiliation and seas of depression and rejection and everything else…” Was he ambitious? “Oh, I think so. You don’t chuck it all in and pitch a car westward and go to LA without thinking some day, down the line, ideally, it’ll work out positively.”

The early days of his acting career: “I had met Steven Spielberg and all these people that had my eyes just rolling back in my head. The opportunities I almost had! And there’s this hideous thing they make you do when you go up for a television show: they make you sign a contract before you walk into the final audition. The last thing they want is for you to have everyone fall in love with you, and then you not have a deal in place. So you sign this thing – and I had no money; I was broke. You’re staring at the five-figure pay cheque you’ll get… if… If! A crazy amount of money for someone who has none. So I was thinking: I’ll pay my loans off and do this and that and maybe get my car fixed… and by that time they’re calling you in, you’re like: ‘Sh-t! I have to do the scene! What the f-ck are the lines?’ I would get hung up on that stuff and be an utter failure in the room.”

Three years in, Hamm was dropped by William Morris: “Which was rough. But also: gut check time. I thought: ‘I could go home, I could teach…’ I had already taught [drama at John Burroughs High School in Missouri] and yes, I think I probably was a good teacher.” But he stayed. He found another agent, and the small roles in big films began rolling in. When all else failed Hamm got by: flirting with his landlady in the interest of getting extensions on the rent (“I was managing that situation, yes…”) and getting the bus, unheard of in LA, when his car broke down and he couldn’t afford to fix it.

He used to work in porn! He was working as the set dresser on a soft porn film (porn films need set dressers? “You gotta move cameras around, and ashtrays; and continuity is apparently an issue”) when Jennifer Westfeldt, who was at that point a distant acquaintance of Hamm’s, invited him to be in a play she was working on in New York. “I came in after another 12-hour day [on the porn film] to this message on my answer phone, and I was so exhausted and depressed and bone tired that I called her back immediately: ‘Yes! I don’t care what it is!’ I borrowed money for a ticket and lived in New York for six weeks on about $300, stayed on a friend’s coach, roller-bladed everywhere…” The play, Lipschtick, was the basis for Kissing Jessica Stein; and Hamm’s six-week stint on it kick-started his and Westfeldt’s relationship. She saved you, I say. “Totally,” he says.

The Hamm had mixed feelings about being cast as The Draper: “Honestly? It had gone on for so long and I’d been so deluded by the fact that I had to prepare virtually every scene in the pilot and read it for the director, and writer, and the executives and all this other stuff, and all this other stuff… and they had finally flown me to New York, where all the executives were. Matt [Weiner] was treating me like I’d already got the part. ‘Just walk around here like you own the place, because you are getting this part.’ I was: ‘All right, we’ll see.’ I was supposed to meet with all the executives for an impromptu cocktail session, at the top of the Gansevoort hotel [in midtown Manhattan]; a beautiful, beautiful fall day. Crisp and lovely. Had a cocktail. Had a meandering, nebulous discussion about things, because I still hadn’t been offered the part… and so, OK, we pay the bill and… meanwhile there was this huge football conference. Soccer. Franz Beckenbauer and Pelé and all these people were there, and a lot of hubbub. I was riding down in the elevator with Franz Beckenbauer, as you do; and the women next to me was the executive, and during the elevator ride, she kind of casually leans over to me and says: ‘By the way, you have the part.’ And my focus was a little split. I said: ‘Thanks!’ And: ‘That’s Beckenbauer! You know that, right?’ We got off the elevator and crazy European journalists are running around, taking photographs in nine different languages… But there’s a sense of relief when you get a part that is almost immediately followed by a sense of impending dread. ‘Now, I have to do it…'”

The Hamm talks about playing The Draper: “Well, I’m an actor. A big part of acting is subverting who you are in the service of a character. So I understand that. And the similarities between mine and Don’s life are well documented. Growing up as a bit of a wanderer, finding my own way, making my own story… Losing my parents early on, albeit not as dramatically and tragically as Don.”

Early tragedies: When Jon Hamm was 10 years old his mother died, suddenly, of stomach cancer. Hamm went to live with his father, who had divorced his mother when he was two. “To lose a parent at 10 – which is young, though not unprecedented – it means you understand, at a very early age, what permanence is.” And then, 10 years later, when Hamm was studying English at the University of Texas, his father died. “I was… unmoored by that. But I was very fortunate to have really good friends in my life whose parents sort of rallied: ‘We’re gonna help this kid out, because otherwise there’s going to be trouble…’ Were they right? I say. “Oh yeah,” he says.

On his depression: You could have lost it? “Easily. I struggled with chronic depression. I was in bad shape. I knew I had to get back in school and back in some kind of structured environment and… continue.” What helped? “Work.” Therapy? “I did do therapy and antidepressants for a brief period, which helped me. Which is what therapy does: it gives you another perspective when you are so lost in your own spiral, your own bullsh-t. It helps. And honestly? Antidepressants help! If you can change your brain chemistry enough to think: ‘I want to get up in the morning; I don’t want to sleep until four in the afternoon. I want to get up and go do my sh-t and go to work and…’ Reset the auto-meter, kick-start the engine!”

And did his parents’ death, and that depression, inform him as an actor? “Well, the theatre department always seems to be the sort of… way station for the orphans and all the people who don’t fit in anywhere else. I always swirled back to it.”

On Twitter: “What with Twitter and the instant global dissemination of media and… It’s a tricky landscape to navigate now. Especially if you’re young and do stupid things, like young people do. Old people do stupid things, too, it’s just that…” We go to bed earlier? “Ha! We go to bed earlier! Right!”

On being gorgeous: “Well, you know, it’s all so, sort of… ephemeral.” Oh come on, I say. It must be lovely to be so routinely fancied. “I suppose… it’s certainly nice for people to consider you attractive or… handsome or whatever the particular adjective is. But it’s completely subjective…” [in his case, I’m not sure it is, actually] “…and mostly ephemeral and I just rolled off a plane and I don’t know how great I look now and, ha ha, I’m not sure what time it is, or what day, or… I mean, I really don’t look like Don Draper now, do I?”

On Jennifer Westfeldt: “We just… really love each other.”

[From The Guardian]

This is what happens when a real man becomes a star. There’s no ego, no image consulting, no playing the media. Just humility, humor and honesty. God, I love him. I love how candid he is. I love that a good guy like this made it. Oh… Hamm.