Jon Hamm and January Jones in a fashion photo shoot.Excerpt begins:
Don Draper was the trickiest role to cast, since the actor would have to not only be credible as a man who essentially lies for a living—and doubles down on those lies at home—but also, as the lead, command sympathy. With extensive television experience on shows such as Providence, The Division, and CSI: Miami but no lead credits, Hamm read for the part early on and survived several further auditions.
But according to Alan Taylor, a Sopranos director who directed the Mad Men pilot and was involved in the casting, Weiner and he held off committing to Hamm because of a “reverse prejudice” about the actor’s good looks. “I think Matt and I, coming off Sopranos, both had a kind of bias because we had a wonderful experience with Jim Gandolfini, and there is a kind of superiority that goes along with that kind of casting—you know, Look, we’re not casting a movie star, we’re casting a great actor.”
But Weiner and Taylor kept coming back to Hamm. “It was a wonderful turning point when we put him through the process of hair and makeup,” Taylor said, “and the first time we saw him with his haircut and his suit, all the women in the office kind of wilted and fainted when he walked by. He was this wonderful icon of maleness, and it took us almost that long to catch up to the fact that it was perfect to cast sort of the perfect male in this part, because what we were doing [in the show] was basically deconstructing that. I mean, that’s just one layer of what he brought.
Obviously the other thing that made us go back to him again and again was this wonderful sadness and lost quality in his eyes. It’s a rare quality for someone who’s a strapping leading man.” That was something Weiner had picked up on right away. In his recollection he settled on Hamm the first time he saw him: “He was the only person I saw that I felt had this old-fashioned masculinity that reminded me a little of James Garner, or William Holden, or the other movie stars that I loved who were Boy Scouts.”
There was something more: According to a recent profile of Hamm in GQ, after the actor read for Mad Men for the first time, Weiner turned to the casting agent and declared, “That man was not raised by his parents.” Which was true: Hamm’s mother had died when he was 10; he had been mostly raised by a grandmother and had a difficult relationship with his father, who himself died when Hamm was 20. Weiner’s observation was not only perceptive—and a little odd—but also relevant: Don’s backstory, which dribbled out across the first season, has him orphaned at a young age. (Hamm dryly told me that the parallel with his own childhood was “serendipitous.”)
In Weiner’s view, Hamm’s upbringing contributed not only to the vulnerability he brings to the role but also the wit, an underappreciated current in Hamm’s performance. “The most valuable thing on television and everywhere is when you find someone who is physically attractive and funny,” Weiner said. “It’s very unusual. At least that’s the common conception among people who cast for a living. Barbara Miller”—the late casting director who had ER, Friends, and The West Wing to her credit—“is often quoted as saying, ‘God doesn’t give with both hands.’ You’re attractive or you’re funny. And I would say to the casting people, ‘Where’s the funny, good-looking person?’ And they’re like, ‘Everyone who’s beautiful and funny is already in the movies.’ And then you find someone who basically has some kind of deprivation that has made it so they don’t even know how attractive they are.”
Hamm certainly doesn’t play up the James Garner–William Holden thing. When I met him for an interview he had a thick carpet of hobo stubble on his face and a greasy St. Louis Blues cap pulled down low on his forehead. Lisa Albert told me that the first day she and the other writers met him he was so casually dressed, even by the unexacting standards of a TV production office, they thought he was delivering lunch. (Related observation: people in L.A. are accustomed to incredibly handsome delivery boys.)
According to the actor, it took him a while to calibrate his performance. “Don is a character who can easily skew into, I think, something way more dark and menacing and mean than maybe what is necessary,” he told me. “I think you definitely want some of that, but it’s a fine line. I would always sort of push for making it a little lighter, and Matt would push for making it obsidian blackness, and Alan Taylor was kind of, I’d say, the middle ground. And I think we found the right balance.” Excerpt ends.
I believe one who doesn't watch these series will not relate to any of the above, so try watch an episode. I bet you would return for more. The whole cast save for one was not familiar to me; Jon Hamm included. But his acting and that of January Jones have garnered them nominations in their respective best actor/actress category.
