Jon Hamm
5 The
Year
Plan
Jon Hamm gave himself five years to make it in Hollywood. With the fourth season of Mad Men currently under way and his new film, The Town, premiering this month, he’s finally o≠ the clock. By Jessica Jones
32
AMERICAN WAY
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SEPTEMBER 1 2010
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This page (inset): Jon Hamm on Mad Men. Opposite page: Hamm and co-star Blake Lively in The Town.
A lot can happen in five years.
F
ive years ago, no one would have paid Jon Hamm any mind when he walked into this cozy Los Angeles–area breakfast joint. Sure, women may have looked twice; face it, the guy is stop-the-spoon-on-the-way-to-your-mouth handsome — six feet tall, trim, sporting a five-oclock shadow at 9 a.m. and a mop of black hair that grazes his forehead just so. Men may have sat up straighter in their seats so as not to be (too) outdone by the charismatic stranger. But their attention would just as quickly have been diverted when the next good-looking Hollywood wannabe came through the door. ¶ Today, though, it’s a di≠erent story. When Hamm, dressed in dark jeans and a blue T-shirt layered under a gray hoodie and navy jacket, slips quietly into this Los Feliz eatery — just minutes from the home he shares with his longtime girlfriend, actress Jennifer Westfeldt, in the LA neighborhood — conversations stop short and are replaced with hushed murmuring. Eyes dart in his direction, and knowing smirks spread across faces. The veteran waitstaff isn’t fazed, as Hamm is a regular here, but the waitress in training can’t help but stare. Because today, Jon Hamm isn’t just anybody. Today, he’s Jon Hamm: star of Mad Men and this month’s new film The Town; Golden Globe winner; two-time host of Saturday Night Live; voice of Mercedes-Benz; one of People magazine’s sexiest men alive and a GQ Man of the Year; face of a network; unwitting fashion icon; and all-around Most Wanted Man in Hollywood. But just five short years ago, he was filling his résumé with oneoff TV guest spots as a doctor on Point Pleasant, a cable guy on The Sarah Silverman Program and a doctor on CSI: Miami. Five years before that, he’d landed his first-ever professional acting gig: a oneepisode appearance on Providence that turned — thanks in part to series lead Melina Kanakaredes’ pregnancy and in part to Hamm’s on-screen spark — into a 19-episode arc that led Hamm to finally quit his day job waiting tables at LA’s Ciudad restaurant. But now, even with all his recent success, Hamm knows he isn’t far from those days when he was taking orders for tips. Geographically, at least. “The parking lot of the studio where we shoot Mad Men is where I parked my car for the last restaurant I worked in. Same place; different circumstances,” he says, grinning. “I have a better parking place now.”
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H
amm was born 39 years ago in St. Louis to Dan, a businessman, and Deborah, a secretary, who divorced when he was 2. A “precocious” child, he was raised primarily by his mother, who stressed the importance of education to her only son from an early age. But when he was 10, Deborah died of cancer and he was sent to live with his father; up until then, Hamm had seen him only every other weekend. His father also had two daughters from a previous marriage, and Hamm was suddenly forced to share a roof with one of them, who still lived at home. “It was,” he says understatedly, “a very strange thing to have happen at that age.” As a teenager, Hamm attended John Burroughs School, a prestigious liberal-arts prep school that laid the cobblestones for the path he would eventually take. “You had to take drawing, you had to take sculpture, you had to take industrial design — you had to take all this stuff. You didn’t have to take it for the rest of your life. You just had to try it once,” he says. Hamm tried, and excelled in, a lot of things — baseball among them — but one
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of the things he found he enjoyed most was acting. When he enrolled at the University of Texas in 1989, he abandoned both, choosing instead to focus on more, well, leisurely pursuits. (“That was when Roger Clemens was playing at UT,” he says of his decision not to play college-level ball. “I was, like, I don’t think I’m at that level.”) The fun came to an end his sophomore year when his father passed away. An orphan at the age of 20, Hamm went back to his home state to finish out the remainder of his college career at the University of Missouri. There, he returned to the stage — performing in some 12 plays — and then to the schoolyard, teaching drama for a year at John Burroughs as a way to say thank you to the professors and to the place that had given him so much. Still “wickedly depressed” over the death of his father and with little family left in St. Louis, Hamm decided to head for Hollywood, where there was a free place to stay (his aunt’s couch) and, he hoped, work. “Eventually I was, like, ‘Enough people have told me I could do this, maybe I should try,’ ” he remembers. “I was 23, 24 years old, and I was, like, ‘I’m not getting any younger.’ ” Unfortunately for him, younger was in. Hamm’s banged-up 1986 Toyota Corolla rolled into town just as the late-’90s teen craze was about to take off — when Freddie Prinze Jr. was prince of the box office and high school dramas such as Dawson’s Creek were hogging memory on early editions of TiVo. Hamm never had a face for the frat pack. “I looked like this when I was 18,” he says, motioning toward his unmistakably adult visage. “I never looked like a teenager, really. I don’t know what the heck happened. So I was not getting those parts, to say the least.” Working at a string of restaurants to make ends meet, Hamm made a promise to himself. “I gave myself five years,” he says. “I was, like, ‘If I’m not actively working by the time I’m 30, then the market has spoken.’ ” The market spoke in three, when he landed the Providence gig and officially became a working actor. He was 29. Bit parts led to bit parts — one of which, in a movie written by and starring Westfeldt called Kissing Jessica Stein, led to their now decade-long romance. In 2006, Hamm was handed a script for a new TV drama set in the 1960s advertising world. The series, called Mad Men, was created by Matthew Weiner, once a writer for The Sopranos, and AMC — the network
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formerly known as American Movie Classics — was rebranding itself around the show. Naturally, the network wanted a big name to build their flagship scripted drama around; Weiner didn’t. He was firm on the fact that his antiheroic protagonist — a mysterious, smooth-talking, philandering Madison Avenue ad executive named Don Draper — would be better if he were played by someone the audience didn’t already know. Though it took seven auditions, Hamm eventually beat out more than 80 other actors for the role. But getting the job was the easy part. Hamm admits to wearing more on his frame that first season than the stylish slim-cut suits preferred by his character; he had on his shoulders the fate of a series — and of a network, to boot. As history has shown, Hamm handled it with panache. Mad Men, currently in its fourth season, has won back-to-back Emmys and three Golden Globe awards for best drama series.
bathroom products), people were surprised — everyone except those who know him well. The self-described “comedy nerd” — who as a kid used to go to the library to check out albums by Bob Newhart, Bill Cosby, Steve Martin and George Carlin — counts Sarah Silverman, Jimmy Kimmel, “Sports Guy”
“I
“That’s kind of been the weirdest thing — this situation where people call you and ask you if you want to do things rather than your having to go beg to do them. I much prefer this method of finding employment.” Hamm won a Globe for his acting the year the writers’ strike quashed a live awards show. (“That’s the best way to win one of those things, as far as I know,” he says of not having to give an acceptance speech.) Critics don’t just universally praise the show; they coo over it like mothers over newborn babies. And much has been made about Hamm’s ability to make such a dubious character relatable — even enviable. “I think people are uncomfortable liking [Don] because maybe they identify with him a little too closely,” Hamm says. “Because, as we’re finding out day by day, everybody’s had those issues at some point in their life — whether it’s fidelity or job dissatisfaction or any of that. And that’s what we explore.” It’s grim stuff, to be sure. So when Hamm was tapped to host Saturday Night Live in 2008 and killed it (with skits like “Jon Hamm’s John Ham,” a line of edible
Bill Simmons, 30 Rock’s Jack McBrayer and longtime buddy Paul Rudd among his friends. Just as bit part once led to bit part, today, big parts lead to big parts. And rather than trudging through endless streams of auditions, now the work comes to him, like his recurring guest spot on 30 Rock or his role in this month’s Boston-cops-and-robbers heist flick, The Town, co-starring and directed by Ben Affleck. “That’s kind of been the weirdest thing — this situation where people call you and ask you if you want to do things rather than your having to go beg to do them,” he says, bewildered. “I much prefer this method of finding employment.”
H
amm is a guy who uses the word fortunate a lot. He uses it when describing everything from scoring his Mad
certainly be happy and excited about it, but that’s not the right way to do it.” One gets the impression from talking to Hamm that despite his astronomical rise over the last few years, he’s exactly the same guy he was when he was taking lunch orders at Ciudad 10 years ago. He plays baseball on an adult rec-league team (albeit one captained by Casey Affleck). He still roots for his home teams, his beloved St. Louis Blues and Cardinals — although now he gets invited to play in all-star celebrity contests, like he did last year at his hometown ballpark, Busch Stadium, and again this year in Anaheim. In what little downtime he’s got, he and Westfeldt stay in and watch The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and American Idol. Or he’ll play tennis, a game he picked up out of sheer competitiveness. “I have an athlete’s will to get better at something,” he says. “I took up tennis not too long ago because a friend of mine just kept beating me, and it was infuriating when I would lose.” (Though Hamm insists he’s not a perfectionist, he has trouble coming up with anythink people are uncomfortable liking thing he’s bad at quickly enough [Don] because maybe they to persuade me that he is actuidentify with him a little too closely.” ally bad at anything.) He’s sweetly self-deprecating, even deigning to make fun of the hair that single-handedly launched a look and brought Brylcreem back into the follicular vernacular. “Some guys just have hair that just, like, works, you know? Bam! A nd then there’s me,” he laments. “I don’t know. It just always looks kind of goofy.” And though he and Westfeldt splurged earlier this year on a lavish trip to Italy, his vacations are often punctuated with decidedly everyman pursuits; during his recent trips to Northern California and France, Hamm admits, he sneaked away to partake in long-distance fantasyfootball drafts. “In France,” he says, shaking his head in embarrassment. “It was on the phone. It probably cost me $4,000. I was like, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this.’ ” It’s admissions like these that make Hamm irresistibly likable and instantly relatable, despite
Men gig to living close to Griffith Park, where his shepherd mix, Cora, can run around, chasing hawks and snakes. He seems genuinely dumbfounded by his recent string of good luck. When asked how he manages to stay humble, he recalls the first time he hit a home run. “I was probably in 10th grade,” he says. “I hit it over the fence, out of the park — and it was off one of the senior pitchers. And I freaked out. I did everything but, like, do cartwheels around the bases. I was like, ‘Oh my God! I can’t believe I hit a home run!’ I was running and screaming and, like, highfiving myself — like, just freaking out. And I got back to the bench and my coach was like, ‘Don’t you ever, ever do that again. What is wrong with you?’ And I was like, ‘Did you see that?!’ It came from such a pure place. But he was like, ‘Don’t do that. Inside. [Points to his chest] You can do that here.’ So I guess that’s where I learned the first time that when things like this happen to you, you can
the fact that, as his 30 Rock co-star Tina Fey once joked, he’s so good-looking, you have to “poke a hole in a paper plate to look at him, like an eclipse.” He still cops to having nerves over the success of Mad Men, even though the buzz and chatter swirling about the show continue to grow with each season. “It always feels like no one’s going to tune in,” he says. “I don’t think that ever goes away, especially for a show like ours. It’s one thing to be in a franchise or procedural show where … something bad happens in the first act, they try to find it out in the second act, and they figure it out in the third act. Our show is a little different, so there’s very much a sense of: Are people going to get this? Are they going to like it? A lot of people are tuning in because the show is sexy — if we dial that element down, is that going to turn people off? And what’s happening with Don and [his wife] Betty — will [their breakup] turn people off? We don’t know.” He remains cautious, if for no other reason than he knows things happen quickly in Hollywood and this could all be taken away in an instant. In five years’ or three years’ or even one year’s time, he could be back on the casting couch, fighting through audition after audition for a guest-starring role on Two and a Half Men. Assuming — safe as it seems to do in his case — that his story will have a happier Hollywood ending, where does he aspire to be in five years? Hopefully still doing on-screen work he can be proud of. Probably producing (he and Westfeldt launched a production company last year). Maybe directing, something he says he’d like to try his hand at. But he’s really not sure. He shrugs off questions about marriage and children too. These things, he coolly reasons, have a way of working themselves out. “I remember when friends of mine were going through rough patches, and I would say, as a way of counseling them, ‘Think of where you were five years ago, and how different it was. And now think of where you can be five years from now.’ It’s not a huge amount of time, but a lot can happen,” he says. “I don’t know, honestly, where I’ll be in five years. I hope it’ll be a progression, not a regression. I hope to be happy and fulfilled and all that stuff. But otherwise, I have no significant goals. I just want it to be a nice five years.” JESSICA JONES is an associate editor at American Way. Like
Tina Fey, she found it hard to look directly at Jon Hamm during their interview.
SEPTEMBER 1 2010
AMERICAN WAY
37
Year
Plan
Jon Hamm gave himself five years to make it in Hollywood. With the fourth season of Mad Men currently under way and his new film, The Town, premiering this month, he’s finally o≠ the clock. By Jessica Jones
32
AMERICAN WAY
SEPTEMBER 1 2010
SEPTEMBER 1 2010
AMERICAN WAY
33
This page (inset): Jon Hamm on Mad Men. Opposite page: Hamm and co-star Blake Lively in The Town.
A lot can happen in five years.
F
ive years ago, no one would have paid Jon Hamm any mind when he walked into this cozy Los Angeles–area breakfast joint. Sure, women may have looked twice; face it, the guy is stop-the-spoon-on-the-way-to-your-mouth handsome — six feet tall, trim, sporting a five-oclock shadow at 9 a.m. and a mop of black hair that grazes his forehead just so. Men may have sat up straighter in their seats so as not to be (too) outdone by the charismatic stranger. But their attention would just as quickly have been diverted when the next good-looking Hollywood wannabe came through the door. ¶ Today, though, it’s a di≠erent story. When Hamm, dressed in dark jeans and a blue T-shirt layered under a gray hoodie and navy jacket, slips quietly into this Los Feliz eatery — just minutes from the home he shares with his longtime girlfriend, actress Jennifer Westfeldt, in the LA neighborhood — conversations stop short and are replaced with hushed murmuring. Eyes dart in his direction, and knowing smirks spread across faces. The veteran waitstaff isn’t fazed, as Hamm is a regular here, but the waitress in training can’t help but stare. Because today, Jon Hamm isn’t just anybody. Today, he’s Jon Hamm: star of Mad Men and this month’s new film The Town; Golden Globe winner; two-time host of Saturday Night Live; voice of Mercedes-Benz; one of People magazine’s sexiest men alive and a GQ Man of the Year; face of a network; unwitting fashion icon; and all-around Most Wanted Man in Hollywood. But just five short years ago, he was filling his résumé with oneoff TV guest spots as a doctor on Point Pleasant, a cable guy on The Sarah Silverman Program and a doctor on CSI: Miami. Five years before that, he’d landed his first-ever professional acting gig: a oneepisode appearance on Providence that turned — thanks in part to series lead Melina Kanakaredes’ pregnancy and in part to Hamm’s on-screen spark — into a 19-episode arc that led Hamm to finally quit his day job waiting tables at LA’s Ciudad restaurant. But now, even with all his recent success, Hamm knows he isn’t far from those days when he was taking orders for tips. Geographically, at least. “The parking lot of the studio where we shoot Mad Men is where I parked my car for the last restaurant I worked in. Same place; different circumstances,” he says, grinning. “I have a better parking place now.”
34
AMERICAN WAY
SEPTEMBER 1 2010
H
amm was born 39 years ago in St. Louis to Dan, a businessman, and Deborah, a secretary, who divorced when he was 2. A “precocious” child, he was raised primarily by his mother, who stressed the importance of education to her only son from an early age. But when he was 10, Deborah died of cancer and he was sent to live with his father; up until then, Hamm had seen him only every other weekend. His father also had two daughters from a previous marriage, and Hamm was suddenly forced to share a roof with one of them, who still lived at home. “It was,” he says understatedly, “a very strange thing to have happen at that age.” As a teenager, Hamm attended John Burroughs School, a prestigious liberal-arts prep school that laid the cobblestones for the path he would eventually take. “You had to take drawing, you had to take sculpture, you had to take industrial design — you had to take all this stuff. You didn’t have to take it for the rest of your life. You just had to try it once,” he says. Hamm tried, and excelled in, a lot of things — baseball among them — but one
SEPTEMBER 1 2010
AMERICAN WAY
35
of the things he found he enjoyed most was acting. When he enrolled at the University of Texas in 1989, he abandoned both, choosing instead to focus on more, well, leisurely pursuits. (“That was when Roger Clemens was playing at UT,” he says of his decision not to play college-level ball. “I was, like, I don’t think I’m at that level.”) The fun came to an end his sophomore year when his father passed away. An orphan at the age of 20, Hamm went back to his home state to finish out the remainder of his college career at the University of Missouri. There, he returned to the stage — performing in some 12 plays — and then to the schoolyard, teaching drama for a year at John Burroughs as a way to say thank you to the professors and to the place that had given him so much. Still “wickedly depressed” over the death of his father and with little family left in St. Louis, Hamm decided to head for Hollywood, where there was a free place to stay (his aunt’s couch) and, he hoped, work. “Eventually I was, like, ‘Enough people have told me I could do this, maybe I should try,’ ” he remembers. “I was 23, 24 years old, and I was, like, ‘I’m not getting any younger.’ ” Unfortunately for him, younger was in. Hamm’s banged-up 1986 Toyota Corolla rolled into town just as the late-’90s teen craze was about to take off — when Freddie Prinze Jr. was prince of the box office and high school dramas such as Dawson’s Creek were hogging memory on early editions of TiVo. Hamm never had a face for the frat pack. “I looked like this when I was 18,” he says, motioning toward his unmistakably adult visage. “I never looked like a teenager, really. I don’t know what the heck happened. So I was not getting those parts, to say the least.” Working at a string of restaurants to make ends meet, Hamm made a promise to himself. “I gave myself five years,” he says. “I was, like, ‘If I’m not actively working by the time I’m 30, then the market has spoken.’ ” The market spoke in three, when he landed the Providence gig and officially became a working actor. He was 29. Bit parts led to bit parts — one of which, in a movie written by and starring Westfeldt called Kissing Jessica Stein, led to their now decade-long romance. In 2006, Hamm was handed a script for a new TV drama set in the 1960s advertising world. The series, called Mad Men, was created by Matthew Weiner, once a writer for The Sopranos, and AMC — the network
36
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SEPTEMBER 1 2010
formerly known as American Movie Classics — was rebranding itself around the show. Naturally, the network wanted a big name to build their flagship scripted drama around; Weiner didn’t. He was firm on the fact that his antiheroic protagonist — a mysterious, smooth-talking, philandering Madison Avenue ad executive named Don Draper — would be better if he were played by someone the audience didn’t already know. Though it took seven auditions, Hamm eventually beat out more than 80 other actors for the role. But getting the job was the easy part. Hamm admits to wearing more on his frame that first season than the stylish slim-cut suits preferred by his character; he had on his shoulders the fate of a series — and of a network, to boot. As history has shown, Hamm handled it with panache. Mad Men, currently in its fourth season, has won back-to-back Emmys and three Golden Globe awards for best drama series.
bathroom products), people were surprised — everyone except those who know him well. The self-described “comedy nerd” — who as a kid used to go to the library to check out albums by Bob Newhart, Bill Cosby, Steve Martin and George Carlin — counts Sarah Silverman, Jimmy Kimmel, “Sports Guy”
“I
“That’s kind of been the weirdest thing — this situation where people call you and ask you if you want to do things rather than your having to go beg to do them. I much prefer this method of finding employment.” Hamm won a Globe for his acting the year the writers’ strike quashed a live awards show. (“That’s the best way to win one of those things, as far as I know,” he says of not having to give an acceptance speech.) Critics don’t just universally praise the show; they coo over it like mothers over newborn babies. And much has been made about Hamm’s ability to make such a dubious character relatable — even enviable. “I think people are uncomfortable liking [Don] because maybe they identify with him a little too closely,” Hamm says. “Because, as we’re finding out day by day, everybody’s had those issues at some point in their life — whether it’s fidelity or job dissatisfaction or any of that. And that’s what we explore.” It’s grim stuff, to be sure. So when Hamm was tapped to host Saturday Night Live in 2008 and killed it (with skits like “Jon Hamm’s John Ham,” a line of edible
Bill Simmons, 30 Rock’s Jack McBrayer and longtime buddy Paul Rudd among his friends. Just as bit part once led to bit part, today, big parts lead to big parts. And rather than trudging through endless streams of auditions, now the work comes to him, like his recurring guest spot on 30 Rock or his role in this month’s Boston-cops-and-robbers heist flick, The Town, co-starring and directed by Ben Affleck. “That’s kind of been the weirdest thing — this situation where people call you and ask you if you want to do things rather than your having to go beg to do them,” he says, bewildered. “I much prefer this method of finding employment.”
H
amm is a guy who uses the word fortunate a lot. He uses it when describing everything from scoring his Mad
certainly be happy and excited about it, but that’s not the right way to do it.” One gets the impression from talking to Hamm that despite his astronomical rise over the last few years, he’s exactly the same guy he was when he was taking lunch orders at Ciudad 10 years ago. He plays baseball on an adult rec-league team (albeit one captained by Casey Affleck). He still roots for his home teams, his beloved St. Louis Blues and Cardinals — although now he gets invited to play in all-star celebrity contests, like he did last year at his hometown ballpark, Busch Stadium, and again this year in Anaheim. In what little downtime he’s got, he and Westfeldt stay in and watch The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and American Idol. Or he’ll play tennis, a game he picked up out of sheer competitiveness. “I have an athlete’s will to get better at something,” he says. “I took up tennis not too long ago because a friend of mine just kept beating me, and it was infuriating when I would lose.” (Though Hamm insists he’s not a perfectionist, he has trouble coming up with anythink people are uncomfortable liking thing he’s bad at quickly enough [Don] because maybe they to persuade me that he is actuidentify with him a little too closely.” ally bad at anything.) He’s sweetly self-deprecating, even deigning to make fun of the hair that single-handedly launched a look and brought Brylcreem back into the follicular vernacular. “Some guys just have hair that just, like, works, you know? Bam! A nd then there’s me,” he laments. “I don’t know. It just always looks kind of goofy.” And though he and Westfeldt splurged earlier this year on a lavish trip to Italy, his vacations are often punctuated with decidedly everyman pursuits; during his recent trips to Northern California and France, Hamm admits, he sneaked away to partake in long-distance fantasyfootball drafts. “In France,” he says, shaking his head in embarrassment. “It was on the phone. It probably cost me $4,000. I was like, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this.’ ” It’s admissions like these that make Hamm irresistibly likable and instantly relatable, despite
Men gig to living close to Griffith Park, where his shepherd mix, Cora, can run around, chasing hawks and snakes. He seems genuinely dumbfounded by his recent string of good luck. When asked how he manages to stay humble, he recalls the first time he hit a home run. “I was probably in 10th grade,” he says. “I hit it over the fence, out of the park — and it was off one of the senior pitchers. And I freaked out. I did everything but, like, do cartwheels around the bases. I was like, ‘Oh my God! I can’t believe I hit a home run!’ I was running and screaming and, like, highfiving myself — like, just freaking out. And I got back to the bench and my coach was like, ‘Don’t you ever, ever do that again. What is wrong with you?’ And I was like, ‘Did you see that?!’ It came from such a pure place. But he was like, ‘Don’t do that. Inside. [Points to his chest] You can do that here.’ So I guess that’s where I learned the first time that when things like this happen to you, you can
the fact that, as his 30 Rock co-star Tina Fey once joked, he’s so good-looking, you have to “poke a hole in a paper plate to look at him, like an eclipse.” He still cops to having nerves over the success of Mad Men, even though the buzz and chatter swirling about the show continue to grow with each season. “It always feels like no one’s going to tune in,” he says. “I don’t think that ever goes away, especially for a show like ours. It’s one thing to be in a franchise or procedural show where … something bad happens in the first act, they try to find it out in the second act, and they figure it out in the third act. Our show is a little different, so there’s very much a sense of: Are people going to get this? Are they going to like it? A lot of people are tuning in because the show is sexy — if we dial that element down, is that going to turn people off? And what’s happening with Don and [his wife] Betty — will [their breakup] turn people off? We don’t know.” He remains cautious, if for no other reason than he knows things happen quickly in Hollywood and this could all be taken away in an instant. In five years’ or three years’ or even one year’s time, he could be back on the casting couch, fighting through audition after audition for a guest-starring role on Two and a Half Men. Assuming — safe as it seems to do in his case — that his story will have a happier Hollywood ending, where does he aspire to be in five years? Hopefully still doing on-screen work he can be proud of. Probably producing (he and Westfeldt launched a production company last year). Maybe directing, something he says he’d like to try his hand at. But he’s really not sure. He shrugs off questions about marriage and children too. These things, he coolly reasons, have a way of working themselves out. “I remember when friends of mine were going through rough patches, and I would say, as a way of counseling them, ‘Think of where you were five years ago, and how different it was. And now think of where you can be five years from now.’ It’s not a huge amount of time, but a lot can happen,” he says. “I don’t know, honestly, where I’ll be in five years. I hope it’ll be a progression, not a regression. I hope to be happy and fulfilled and all that stuff. But otherwise, I have no significant goals. I just want it to be a nice five years.” JESSICA JONES is an associate editor at American Way. Like
Tina Fey, she found it hard to look directly at Jon Hamm during their interview.
SEPTEMBER 1 2010
AMERICAN WAY
37
