Physical presence is a big part of it.” On this particular April weekend, he was going to see Westfeldt as she was getting her footing in The Library, a new play directed by Steven Soderbergh at the Public Theater, in New York. “One or the other of us has to make the flight,” he says. He and Westfeldt have a rule not to spend more than two weeks apart, which means that, like Don Draper in Season Seven, Hamm is bi-coastal. On Saturday morning Hamm boarded an American Airlines flight bound for New York.
“And we’ll finish the last seven probably the beginning of July. “We finished the first seven in February,” Hamm says. He was working on an episode that will air in the spring of 2015. Hamm spent the first week of April at Los Angeles Center Studios, in downtown L.A., just a block away from where he waited tables in the 1990s. Now Mad Men has entered its seventh and final season, which AMC has decided to break into two seven-episode cycles: the first will end May 25, and the second in the late spring of 2015. I wanted to see his reaction, which was a scary thing to do.” “Part of it was me realizing that he needed to know, and part of me wanted to try the story out on somebody who was invested in it. “I told him the whole story,” Weiner says. I was like, ‘Are we in a Dickens novel?’ ” Then their work began in earnest: “A 10-minute walk,” Hamm says, “and Matt told me the whole story of Don Draper. I don’t think the director wanted me at the beginning. It took a long time for everybody to get on board. “I had to audition a lot,” Hamm says in the 35th-floor lounge of the Mandarin Oriental hotel, not far from the New York apartment he shares with his girlfriend of 16 years, the actor-writer-director Jennifer Westfeldt, and a 13-year-old shepherd mix named Cora. The executives were slow to see it, however, and the actor had to endure numerous callbacks.
As far back as 2000, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner had been thinking deeply about the show’s flawed hero-a polished executive who has risen to success under an assumed name-and he knew Hamm was right for the part early in the audition process. More important, he had yet to prove that he could go dark, that beneath his handsome exterior lay an understanding of suffering and the skill to put it across to audiences. No one who saw him on NBC’s Providence or ABC’s What About Brian or Lifetime’s The Division guessed that he would go on, in the guise of 1960s adman Don Draper (né Dick Whitman), to embody old-school masculinity for 21st-century viewers. Jon Hamm was a 34-year-old journeyman hunk television actor who had been kicking around Los Angeles for more than 10 years when he tried out for Mad Men, in 2006.
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