Jon Hamm Talks About Sudden Fame, “Mad Men” and “The Day the Earth Stood Still”
Jon Hamm of “Mad Men” and “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”
LOS ANGELES — To understand just how quickly Jon Hamm’s career hit warp speed, the best indications were those sounds of immediate recognition when audiences first saw trailers for “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”
Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly starring in the remake of Robert Wise’s 1951 classic seemed natural, but then Hamm showed up on screen as scientist Michael Granier and murmurs of “Don Draper!” or “Mad Men!” rippled through theaters. Like Klaatu, the alien played by Reeves who warns the people of Earth of their planetary neglect, Hamm had arrived.
“Mad Men,” a show about 1960s advertising executives that premiered on AMC in 2007, is only seen by a small audience — 1.75 million viewers watched the second season finale according to Broadcasting & Cable magazine. But “Mad Men” fans are mad for the show, with its impact reaching “Sopranos” levels. According to “Day the Earth Stood Still” director Scott Derrickson, they hired Hamm just before “Mad Men” mania took hold.
“Only a few episodes had been on the air,” Derrickson said. “If there had been, like, five more episodes on the air we would not have been able to afford him — that’s true.”
“I did come on after we wrapped the first season of ‘Mad Men,’” said Hamm, 37. “It was already going, and I came kind of into the scene where I basically explain what’s about to happen: a three-page long monologue about astronomy and trajectories. I basically got off a plane, got fitted and thrown onto the set.”
That sounds a lot like Hamm’s career liftoff. Not long ago, Hamm was doing TV guest roles procedural dramas, but his work as Don Draper, whose dexterity with advertising messages is on par with his skill at manipulating his own past and present, delivered a giant career boost to the St. Louis native.
By the end of the first season, Don Draper was a favorite pop psychology subject, as much a symbol of the dangers of disloyalty as Tony Soprano was of the concept of loyalty above all else. Men suddenly wanted to dress like Don Draper — the width of ties reverted to 1962 slimness as a partial result of “Mad Men” style — and Hamm was a sought-after guest on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” and “Saturday Night Live.”
“I’m so relatively new to all of this,” Hamm said. “The last couple of years have been bizarre, to say the least. It’s still kind of a weird thing to wake up and come to this and sit next to these people (Reeves and Connelly) and talk about things like this. So it’s new and weird and terrifying — all of that stuff, but still very exciting.”
But Hamm said that “Mad Men” is larger than one man, and is about far more than advertising. He sees a line between the kinetic social shifts depicted in the show and current events, much as “The Day the Earth Stood Still” emphasizes the dangers of current environmental mistreatment.
“One of the big themes of the show (‘Mad Men’) is ‘change,’ and that has been a significant watchword in recent culture, as well,” he said. “I think when you’re looking at a time when there’s a huge paradigm shift in the social vibe that was the 1960s — we explored the beginning of that, and we’re now moving through the rest of that — there are a lot of parallels to right now. And so it’s not lost on some of the themes of this film, too … take a look at where we are and what we’re doing, and maybe there’s a better way.
“Those things resonate in the culture,” Hamm said. “Yeah, it’s a small cable show that nobody really watches, but yet it resonates larger than what it is.”
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i really, really hope that The People In Charge of shows on tv and the whatnotness of it all realize that there are many of us who are a season or two or three behind in watching these good shows. So, the ratings may be smallish when it comes to people actually watching when it airs…but surely there’s got to be a way to rate how many folks are dvr’ing this stuff, or netflixing like us? i am SO SO ready to watch season two as soon as it comes on dvd. i swear to god, if that show gets canceled because of low viewership….sniff…