Jon Hamm: Why Mad Men was an instant star Jon Hamm, catapulted to celebrity by the hit TV series 'Mad Men', tells Benji Wilson about the show's contemporary resonances Until last week, not many people in this country had heard of Jon Hamm. That all changed with the arrival of Mad Men on British TV. Hamm's performance as Don Draper - the sharp-suited, enigmatic übermensch of Sterling Cooper, a Madison Avenue ad agency in 1960 - had already propelled the 37-year-old from bit-part to major player in the States. Coming from nowhere - unless you count roles in little-known US series such as Providence and The Division - he won this year's Golden Globe award for best television actor ahead of Hugh Laurie, Bill Paxton and Jonathan Rhys Meyers. It's a new product launch that Don Draper himself would be proud of. That Mad Men went on to win the best drama gong is less of a surprise, given its creator's pedigree. Matthew Weiner was a writer on The Sopranos, but he got the job thanks to a spec script about Sixties ad men. He scribbled away at his pet project in the evenings until The Sopranos, a high watermark for television drama, finished last year, then set about his own production. Weiner's finely-honed evocation of a 1960s ad agency makes the near-past look like another world, but it's his choice of an America on the cusp of the culture wars and ready for political change that is his trump card - Mad Men is not only beautiful to watch, it's also deeply resonant today. Hamm's Don Draper, chiselled and coiffed, has a foot in both the fusty Fifties and the swinging Sixties. advertisement "Don Draper knows how to play both sides and he's a survivor - he realises that to survive you have to adapt," says Hamm. "And he does - very, very well. As most people who work in an office environment understand, there are politics going on all the time, and if you don't play them well, you don't succeed." Draper is rarely without a drink in his hand, a cigarette on his lips or a woman by his side, but he's no copybook cad. "Don Draper is like a lot of American men at that time," says Hamm. "There was a certain expectation of what you were supposed to be and what you were supposed to do. Outwardly you were supposed to conform to that model. But a lot of people on the inside felt quite different. I don't think he's a bad man - he has a fairly strong morality, but he's a rugged individualist." There is much to suggest that Hamm's understanding of Draper comes from his own father. Born in 1971, Hamm grew up in St Louis, Missouri. It was no New York City, but his father was a big businessman there at the time. "My dad would have been 27 or 28 in 1960 so he would have been a young executive, and being a big fish in a much smaller pond, he would have had a Don Draper-type sway over things. I've looked back over a lot of photographs of my father and I've heard a lot of things…" Hamm's father died when he was 20, but he has learnt more about him in recent years. "There are a lot of stories about your parents that sometimes you just don't get when you're a little kid - like philandering or maybe not being the best person. And you think, yeesh! We all have impressions of people in our lives, political leaders or father figures, where you think, 'They always had our best interests in mind.' Very often that's not the case - it's the opposite, they had their best interests in mind. "Now, you can be angry about all of that stuff or you can just realise it was a different time. People behaved differently back then. I think that's a big attraction of our show." Unlike so many TV series that were stymied by the recent writers' strike, Mad Men completed its run, took home its awards and has just begun shooting a second series. Hamm believes it's no coincidence that Mad Men has struck a chord at this time. "The 1960 election between Kennedy and Nixon was the closest US election in history - until the 2000 election. Both were disputed, both were gained by what many people thought was shady or underhand dealing, and both left half the country completely p***ed off. "I think in the same way that the torch was passed to this neo-conservative aspect of the country in 2000 - to the dismay of myself and many other people globally - the torch was passed from that post-war conservative Eisenhower era to the new, young, vibrant Kennedy era - to the dismay of a lot of people who thought that the country was gong to go to hell in a handbasket. "So it is very telling. I feel like we're on the edge of another culture war, and our show brings out that message." Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/03/14/bvmad114.xml