| JON HAMM |
Jon Hamm has been acting since age 6, when he played
Winnie the Pooh in his first grade class play. The St.
Louis native went on to study acting on a theatre
scholarship at the University of Missouri and teach high
school before moving to Hollywood to pursue his career.
His credits include the features, We Were Soldiers,
Kissing Jessica Stein and Space Cowboys, and TV's
Providence, The Unit, and The Division. He stars in the
new AMC cable dramedy, Mad Men. Hamm is also an avid
golfer.
Tavis: Jon Hamm stars in one of this summer's most
talked-about new television series, "Mad Men."
The show is the creation of one of the executive
producers and writers from "The Sopranos" and
tells the story of Madison Avenue advertising execs back
in 1960. It airs Thursday nights at 10:00 on AMC. Here
now, a scene from "Mad Men."
Tavis: Look at that Jon Hamm - he's smooth, he's smooth.
Jon Hamm: It's a lot easier when they write the words for
you, you know what I mean?
Tavis: (Laughs) You okay?
Hamm: Yeah. It's a lot easier when they spell it all out
for you and you get those great speeches.
Tavis: I was hoping you were going to wear one of those
really nice suits, and see if I could talk you out of it
today, man. The wardrobe is pretty slick on this show.
Hamm: Our costume designer, Janie Bryant, that's all
vintage. It all comes from this big costume shop up in
the Valley somewhere, and they're all - they're the suits
that my dad wore, they're the suits that your dad wore -
everybody's dad wore, and they just cut them and they
make them right - they fit to you. And she does an
amazing job on it. But they knew how to dress back then,
they definitely did.
Tavis: Let me put you on the spot. What, in doing the
role, have you most discovered about that era that kind
of shocked you? I got my own list, but when I've seen the
show I'm like wow, that was going on back then? That's
how they behaved back then?
Hamm: Yeah, I think that is a big part of it. I think
growing up - I grew up in the seventies and eighties in
the Midwest.
Tavis: We both did.
Hamm: Yeah. And you had this popular sort of idea of what
happened in the fifties and sixties as a sort of golden
era in American culture. Everything was great and we'd
just won World War II and it was - IBM and all these big
corporations were really going, and there was just - the
American dream was sort of at its height, and that's how
it was presented by a lot of the people, like the
character I play.
And when you really look at it what you really find out -
and this is what I think, getting to your question of
what surprised me the most, is that people weren't this
sort of perfect, happy American citizen. They had doubts
and fears -
Tavis: The good old days weren't so good.
Hamm: The good old days weren't so good. You had doubts,
you had fears, you had anxiety - you had all this stuff,
and it's a lot of the same stuff we're dealing with as
quote, unquote, modern Americans today. You have to
remember that those people thought they were as modern as
they could get. They had all the newfangled machinery and
all that stuff. You just replace all that stuff with
Internet or AOL or whatever you wanna replace it with and
it's very similar to today.
Tavis: The obvious stuff - we knew that people were much
more casual and free and open about smoking back in the
sixties, that we did know; hence the scene we just saw a
moment ago. I said to myself, “I hope Jon Hamm
doesn't get sick, smoking all those cigarettes.”
Because you guys are smoking, like, in every scene.
Hamm: Yeah, it's pretty rough. Fortunately, they're not
real cigarettes. They don't have nicotine or tar or any
of that stuff.
Tavis: That helps, yeah.
Hamm: That helps a lot. But by the end of the day on a
full day, my contacts are sticking to my eyes and I'm
just - you're kind of walking around in a haze,
literally.
Tavis: When I saw the first episode, and this is in
advance of knowing that you were going to come on the
show and I was just curious to see what this thing was
about because the ads were everywhere. So I checked it
out and I was, like, blown away when there was - in the
scene where the new secretary goes in for a checkup -
actually going to get some pills, get on the pill, from
her doctor. And while she's in the doctor's room, he
lights up.
Hamm: Smoking a cigarette.
Tavis: I couldn't believe - I was, like, wow. So one,
he's a doctor smoking, but then he's lighting up during
an examination.
Hamm: Well, and the scene we saw was trying to come up
with a new way to pitch cigarettes because what had just
happened was Reader's Digest had published this very
famous study that basically said cigarettes were
addictive and they cause cancer, in no uncertain terms.
So the federal government then said, “All right, you
can't pitch these things as healthy anymore; they're
clearly not.”
And before that it was, like, four out of five doctors
smoke Lucky Strike, and if you smoke these it'll make
your throat clear and it'll give you energy and it'll be
all this stuff that is patently untrue. (Laughter) So
then the challenge of my character was, in the first
episode, to come up with a new way to pitch these. And
what he basically comes up with is it's toasted, which is
a meaningless slogan, but it gets people off of it's
cancerous, it's terrible, it's gonna kill you. Who cares?
It tastes good.
Tavis: That's what advertising does - change the
conversation.
Hamm: Kind of, yeah. And if you look at advertising as
sort of a way - the way I kind of describe it is that
these guys get to determine what makes people happy,
whether it's buying a certain car, smoking a certain
cigarette, wearing a certain suit or shirt. It defines
cool and it defines, by a measure of that, what makes you
happy. And yet all of these guys are unfulfilled, in
relationships that maybe they're not so happy with, in
jobs that maybe they're not so happy with, trying to
manage it with cigarettes and booze and all the other
stuff that you sort of self-medicate with.
Tavis: Your last point notwithstanding, Jon, what have
you taken - or what are you taking, what are you
learning, as this show goes forward? What are you
learning about how you feel about what advertisers,
advertising really does to us? Subliminally, a lot of
times.
Hamm: I think nowadays people are much more savvy to what
they're being fed, especially young kids. You get online
and you're constantly bombarded with images and
information and a lot of it's maybe untrue, and a lot of
it's maybe spam email or whatever it is. So I think kids
now, their detectors are much more fine-tuned than the
people in my generation or even older, because we're
just, I think, sort of accustomed - if it's in print, you
kind of believe it.
Well, it must be true. And I think more recent history
has made us believe that well, let's take everything with
a little bit of a grain of salt, including especially
advertising. So I think that's something that I've always
- I've always been a fan of advertising, I've always been
a fan of television, I've loved commercials, I've loved
all the jingles, I loved all the stuff. And we - the
sixties and seventies - the seventies when I was a little
kid was like a golden age of that.
You had the Coke commercials and you had all the cool car
ads and all that stuff was fun. It was really fun to
watch and fun to be a part of. And only later in your
life do you realize that there's a reason it's fun; it's
because they want to get you on board and they want you
to buy their product.
Tavis: The other thing I was just literally - we were
just teasing - I was in the makeup room with my makeup
artist, Sheila and Vanessa, the producer of this segment,
and we were talking about the show and about the blatant
sexism. (Laughs) I would be fired and sued 10 million
times over -
Hamm: Oh, six ways to Sunday, man.
Tavis: - if I did half the stuff you do in this TV show.
Hamm: And I'm not even the bad one.
Tavis: And you're not the worst one in the series.
Hamm: No, I'm not. I'm not the bad one.
Tavis: I was about to say that. (Laughs) The guys down
the hallway are much worse than you are.
Hamm: But it's not just sexism. It's sexism, it's racism,
it's homophobia - it's all of this stuff which is sort of
anybody that's remotely different. And a big theme of the
show is at this point in time - and it kind of sits at a
watershed moment in American history in 1960 - and people
think the sixties, they tend to think of the late sixties
which is like the hippies and the counterculture and the
drug culture and all that other stuff.
But this was the very end of the Eisenhower era and the
very beginning of the sixties and what would become the
Kennedy era. And it sits right on this thing of - and my
character sits right on this precipice as well between
the younger generation and the older generation. And our
creator, Matt Weiner, talks about half the people in
America didn't vote for Kennedy.
Half the people - half the people - were very upset that
Kennedy got elected and wanted to stay back in the
fifties and that kind of old way of thinking. And
politically, that's when a lot of the southern Democrats
split off and all this other stuff happened. There was a
lot going on at the beginning of the sixties and it was
all kind of underground and Kennedys and the civil rights
movement and LBJ and Vietnam all kind of brought it to
the surface.
Tavis: I didn't know - to the series itself - I didn't
know, Jon, what to expect, of course, when I tuned in for
the first episode. What I did find personally was that
for me it was refreshing to see somebody attempt
something different - to do something different on the
television landscape right about now. I'm so over reality
television, so over every show being like every other
show.
And I didn't know if I was going to like "Mad Men"
or not, but I was at least turned on by the fact that
here was something that was a throwback to a bygone era.
The costumes were - the set and everything else is
authentic. So it was refreshing for me to see something
different on the screen. As an actor, though, what's it
feel like for you to be able to be a part of that?
Hamm: It feels great. You hit the nail on the head. It's
just nice to be involved with something that is original
in every sense of the word. It's not like
"CSI," it's not like "Big Brother" or
any reality. It is a very scripted, very tightly
controlled. We shoot it like a movie. There's one camera,
and we set up scenes and we try to decorate them, and
everybody's looking sharp and it's lit well and it's very
high quality television.
But all of our creative people, for the most part, come
from "The Sopranos," which was the same way.
They shot that thing like a movie, they wrote it like a
movie, they took their time telling their story. There
were these kind of tangential things that maybe led to
something or maybe didn't, but they still were worthy of
being included in the story. And at the end of the day,
that's what we're doing - we're telling a story. We're
telling a story about my character and the world he lives
in. And hopefully more people will find it's a very
fascinating world.
I happen to find it incredibly fascinating just because
of all the questions that it brings up. Were people
really like this? Was sexism and racism and all that
stuff - was it that in your face?
Tavis: What's funny about it is - I'm out of time here,
but what's funny about it is when you think about it, it
wasn't that long ago.
Hamm: And it wasn't that long ago.
Tavis: That's the scary part. (Laughs)
Hamm: That's the scary part.
Tavis: It's, like, 40 years ago.
Hamm: That's so true.
Tavis: It wasn't that long ago. Nice to meet you.
Hamm: Lovely to meet you, as well. I'm going to give you
that one, yeah.
Tavis: No, I got you now. Thank you. (Laughter) Jon Hamm,
one of the stars of "Madmen" on AMC. I think
it's worth checking out. You check it out and let me
know.
Source: http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200708/20070829_hamm.html
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