Middle Age Hollywood

Matt Damon keeps things similar while Jon Hamm changes things up between the two live 30 Rock episodes.

By Daniel Fiene: I met Don Draper (Jon Hamm) and Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) last week at the Cologne Conference at the red carpet. I just shot an interview by a ZDF-crew with my flip. I wish the Mad-Men-Crowd all the best for the Mad Men start at ZDF Neo. Have fun with this short interview.

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Craig chats with Jon Hamm from "The Town" and "Howl"...Bond villains, with pig and bunny!

Highlights:

- Jon and Craig pretend to be Bond villians through puppets
- Talks about his new movie Howl
- Jon explains an iPhone game app
- Jon explains why he would not want a pet pig and jokes about his last name

As Mad Men’s Don Draper, Jon Hamm is a master-of-the-universe type in stylish suits and “helmet hair.” But off-camera he’s just a baseball-loving, New York City foodie who’s not afraid to look like an idiot.



Before AMC cast Jon Hamm to play Don Draper on Mad Men, his acting gigs peaked out with various smaller parts such as an 18-episode run on the series Providence, a two-episode run on CSI: Miami and a supporting role opposite his girlfriend, Jennifer Westfeldt, in the 2001 movie Kissing Jessica Stein. Three years later, it’s hard to think of contemporary culture without the impact of the runaway hit Mad Men, a show that’s become shorthand for a very specific time, place and look, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since Michael Douglas ruled Manhattan as Gordon Gekko in the original Wall Street. This fall the 39-year-old has two films out—The Town, directed by and costarring Ben Affleck, and Howl, a biopic about beat poet Allen Ginsberg—and though he’ll admit that Don Draper has changed the landscape of television and the lives and styles of many of its viewers (especially those in New York), at 8:30 on a Saturday morning before his first cup of coffee, he’d much prefer to talk about baseball and The Big Lebowski. And so we did. Eventually.

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He now plays the dapper, suave Don Draper in Mad Men, so it's hard to picture Jon Hamm battling chronic depression, relying on antidepressants and therapy to beat the illness. But that's just what he did.

Hamm, 38, reveals to the U.K. magazine The Observer how he was hit hard with the death of his father at the age of 20.



"I was ... unmoored by that. I struggled with chronic depression. I was in bad shape," he says. Hamm's mother had died of stomach cancer when he was only 10, and he went to live with his father. His parents had divorced when he was just a toddler.

He has told Vanity Fair that his character Don Draper is partly inspired by his father. The actor, currently a hit in Ben Affleck's movie The Town, says work also helped him recover: "I knew I had to get back in school and back in some kind of structured environment and ... continue."

At the time of his father's death, he was a student at the University of Texas, and "was very fortunate to have really good friends in my life whose parents sort of rallied," he tells The Observer.

As far as therapy and antidepressants are concerned, he says, "It gives you another perspective when you are so lost in your own spiral. It helps."

How do they help? He adds: "You can change your brain chemistry enough to think: 'I want to get up in the morning; I don't want to sleep until four in the afternoon. I want to get up and ... go to work and ...' Reset the auto-meter, kick-start the engine!"

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Mad Men's Jon Hamm is on the cover of the latest issue of 'The Observer Magazine'.

Jon Hamm has suggested that people love watching his Mad Men character Don Draper misbehave.

In an interview with The Observer, Hamm admitted that he is surprised that people like Don so much.

"It's a curious phenomenon, I suppose, given the moral turpitude of that character," he joked.



"People are thrilled to watch other people doing this, relieved that they don't have to deal with the consequences - there is a vicarious thrill. It is exciting to see people misbehave. That's a big part of cinema and theatre and television. Watching people who are ostensibly good do bad things, and kind of root for them to get away with it, and know that it's bad and yet..."

However, Hamm claimed that he was "on the bottom of everyone's list" when he auditioned for the part.

"I really, really, really wanted to do it and really, really, really responded to the character," he said. "And really, really felt like I had a handle on it and fit the part well, for whatever reason. I knew it was an enormous risk for the network to put all their chips on... certainly no celebrity of any kind. No name to promote."

He continued: "There's a sense of relief when you get a part that is almost immediately followed by a sense of impending dread - 'Now I have to do it'...'"


Source: digitalspy

Talks about St. Louis sports.
Talks about how exciting hockey is.
Talks about his all-time Blues lineups.
Talks about which hockey player he'd like to play in a biopic.
Is swoon-worthy in general.





Thanks to cinnamongirlxxx

Jon says he’s glad he didn’t have a career like the 'Twilight' actors and teen sensation Miley Cyrus.

“I don’t know how the Twilight kids or Miley Cyrus or whoever handle it,” he says.



“You f*** up, make one bad decision, and people in Thailand Twitter about it.

“I’m old. I’m boring. I usually duck the paparazzi.”

Source: showbizspy

'Mad' man is talk of 'The Town'

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Jon Hamm announced on Thursday night's Late Night with Jimmy Fallon that he will be hosting Saturday Night Live on October 30th.

JON HAMM: THE LAST ALPHA MALE




Hamm grew up in St Louis. His parents split when he was 2, and his mother raised him. Weekends were spent with his father, a larger-than-life character in the trucking industry who'd take him along to bars and clubs after work. Then, when Hamm was 10, everything unraveled horribly: His mother died of cancer. He was sent to live with his grandmother. His father died his sophomore year in college.



Hamm's high-school girlfriend's older brother's college roommate was an eager actor named Paul Rudd. Hamm fell in with Rudd and his gang and visited them in L.A. in 1992, crashing in their "shit-hole North Hollywood apartment" during the spring break of his junior year. He came out for good in 1995. "At a certain point," he says, "I figured I was way too far down the line for a normal career. I was waiting tables with a friend who had been a business major, and he really wanted to get this job selling copiers. I just thought, 'Really? You really want that job?' My dad was a salesman. He could sell anything to anybody. I was like, 'Nah, not for me.'" Hamm arrived in Hollywood just in time for the reign of the CW and the WB. "If you didn't look 18 years old, you weren't working. And I didn't look 18 years old when I was 18. I always looked 10 years older than I was."


"If this show had been on any of the major networks," Hamm says, "I never would have been cast, ever, period, done, never, no way. They would want someone like Rob Lowe who's got a proven track record. I would've gotten all the way to the end . . . and then I wouldn't get cast."

"It's funny," Hamm says. "You realize certain people didn't know I was funny because they only saw me through Mad Men—or only knew me as me and never thought I could do Mad Men. Sarah Silverman said, 'Hammy, you're good. I had no idea!'" Silverman met Hamm in 2000 through a group of friends, including Rudd, Adam Scott, and Jon Schroeder, who all played poker together. "When I tuned in to Mad Men, I couldn't believe he was this smoldering, brooding sexual man," Silverman says. "I was like, 'Oh my God—that's Hamm!' To me, he's just this super-silly idiot.

I ask him if he feels lucky that his overnight success took as long as it did. "Absolutely, I don't know how the Twilight kids or Miley Cyrus or whoever handle it. You f*ck up, make one bad decision, and people in Thailand Twitter about it."

Hamm's mostly left alone, he says: "I'm old, I'm boring. I usually just duck the paparazzi. It's literally someone waiting for you to pick your nose or scratch yourself. I'm sorry, I scratched my balls—who doesn't do that? You're really going to run that story? What the f*ck?! Everyone has picked their nose at one point in their life too."

The subject of the next Mad Men hiatus comes up, and Hamm seems earnestly nonchalant. "I don't know what the alternative is," he says. "I don't have this huge, overarching plan. I don't know what I'm gonna wake up and feel like doing tomorrow, let alone five years down the line.

"I think that's enabled me to get to where I am. I certainly go after what I want. But I just have detached amusement about a lot of it. Because it's silly. This job is ridiculous. There's a line from 30 Rock that Tracy Morgan says that makes me laugh out loud: 'I remember that movie—I got paid one million teacher salaries.' It is what it is."


SOURCE

GQ MEN OF THE YEAR AWARDS 2010, LONDON (09/07/10)








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