All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission. Mad Men was close to concluding its second season and had crested, in a little more than a year, into a full-blown cultural phenomenon. We drove in a big, looping circle around L. He had only recently splurged on his first serious car, asking his amused financial adviser for permission first. I got the car wrong in the piece, which annoyed Hamm. It was a Audi S5. Louis-style thin-shaved roast-beef sandwich.
I get the feeling, by this point, that he also just likes to drive. Ever a bro of his generation, Hamm, now 44, cannot help but quote Ferris Bueller as he eases into gear: "It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up. It has 7, miles on it. Back in , Hamm in his civilian drag of jeans and a baseball hat passed almost unnoticed. These days, things are different. Thus, the Saturday Night Live appearances, the scene-stealing roles on 30 Rock and in Bridesmaids, a raft of the kind of cameos that get listed in the IMDb alongside the words voice and uncredited in parentheses.
Jon Hamm, in the good way, is not really very cool. Long before stardom, he was a familiar presence on the periphery of L. And listening to his hosts, you can hear echoes of the giddy thrill nerds feel when the cool kid suddenly sits at their lunch table. He is perhaps falsely modest on this point, but emphatic: "I have no affinity for it other than my appreciation of it. I had no desire to get up onstage and tell jokes.
I prefer to stand next to really funny people. I was always good at being observationally funny—like contributing something funny to the conversation. Comedy has also proved an elegant solution to the problem faced by any actor who spends a long time playing an iconic role. But he is never less like the adman than when he is playing the comic.
Hamm shrugs. So maybe the future is clear: funny, varied, surprising. And right now, the only thing standing between Hamm and the future is The Past. It has been at once an infatuated elegy for an era and a great Oedipal fuck-you to it. And the end has been there literally from the beginning, ever since Don began his long, tumbling fall.
