colossusx (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} colossusx) wrote in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} ohnotheydidnt,@ 2008-07-14 14:21:00 |
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Mad Sexy: An Interview with Jon Hamm
MR: So this show that you’re on – it’s a real shame that the media doesn’t really cover it. It’s so overlooked.
JH: [laughs] I know, I wish at some point we could get some kind of press representation. But we’re on cable, no one pays attention.
MR: I’m kidding, obviously. But I talked to Matt Weiner the other day, and he pointed out that a lot of the press happened after the season was over.
JH: Yeah, definitely. I don’t know who’s kind of in charge of that and schedules and long-lead [press] and all that. But it has kind of been all this buzz that exists well after the show ran its course, which is I think in a lot of ways kind of great. People can read about it and say, “Oh, I want to watch that,” and they can see it [various places], on iTunes or now that the DVD is out. It’s part of that kind of brave new world that we live in of everything being on demand.
MR: Has it been different making the show this season, knowing that people are going to be paying attention?
JH: Well, making it has been – you feel like you’re swimming a marathon underwater. All the other stuff just fades into the background. I can’t do it any other way. I have to focus on what I’m doing. All that stuff happens, and you have things like interviews and Peabody Awards and trips and things like that, which are kind of mind-blowing when they happen. Obviously none of that was the case last year. So that level of distraction was not around. But the work is the same and the show is the same show, and we have the same schedule and the same people and a lot of the same directors and crew – so that all feels great, it’s all been consistent.
MR: Speaking of things that seem the same, watching the show again on DVD, and seeing a couple of episodes from this season, I was struck again by how many layers it has. As a viewer, you could focus or think about any number of things – the dialogue, the relationships, the themes, even the humor.
JH: There are certainly a lot of layers and that’s very much on purpose. It’s the kind of thing that benefits from repeat watching, like a good book. You can read a book when you’re 25 years old and when you’re 45 years old and it can mean completely different things to you. It is definitely not media to be consumed and disposed of. It stays with you. And it’s an honor to be able to work on something like that, particularly in this kind of media landscape. There’s not much out there like that.
MR: As an actor, is it the same challenge for you personally this year, or is it different?
JH: Obviously the one different feeling is this year is living up to expectation and hype. That’s much more on Matt than on any of us, but it’s still out there and I hope that we’re going to have a lot of new viewers coming to the show. You’re kind of weighing that feeling of, we are telling a story that is continuing [against,] here are some people that may be new to the show so we do have to reintroduce the gang.
But I think that’s the challenge of every season of television, you kind of start at square 1 unless it’s been running for years and years. It just feels very comfortable this year because we’ve had a whole season of being around these people. It was a lot easier to pick back up where we left off this year than it was from the pilot to Episode 2. [A year passed] between those two episodes.
MR: It’s funny, but watching Season 1 again, I was struck by the idea that we had barely scratched the surface of who these people are. Is that kind of the vibe of this season, that we’re going to find out a lot more about them?
JH: That’s kind of one of the promises that is set up in doing a show that is set in the past – it’ll move forward in time. We are very fortunate that our show is set in a time in American history where a lot of things are in transition and changing, so you don’t have to wait 10 years for a sea change to happen. They were happening almost month to month.
Watching these characters, who in many ways are very ordinary, but in other ways are extraordinary in their circumstances, live through these times, we can watch them and really feel a kinship with them. Matt did a very smart thing by placing it in this moment in time and choosing to show the passage of time, not only as it affects our characters but as it affects the world around them.
MR: That final scene of Season 1, when Don’s sitting on the steps in his house, Matt described that to me last year as, “This guy has nothing.” It made me think, what is satisfaction to this guy? I mean, obviously, that’s probably the question that will drive the entire series. But do you feel like you have any idea as to what would be satisfaction to him, what would be contentment? It’s like, he’s trying to build that and he’s sabotaging it at the same time.
JH: Right. Well, I think he’s very conflicted about what that is. He is so sure of what it is for other people, what he’s trying to sell other people. The answer for himself is much less clear and certainly less clear to him and also, the things he may think will make him happy are in conflict with the things in his life.
He may want to live a life with another woman but he has a wife and kids and a family. He may decide, which we saw a little bit of last season, that family is very important and he really wants to explore that and realize how much that means to him, but he’s done so many things to erode that. He’s kind of at sea there too. Something in Don, from his past, is so broken in so many ways that he’s got to do a lot of the work to fix that before he can truly move forward and find real happiness that is not ephemeral and meaningless.
MR: Yeah, again, watching the season again, it was like, what’s so heartbreaking about Don is that he may not know what it is to be loved, and that seriously impairs his ability to really love anyone. How do you feel about that characterization, is it wrong?
JH: I don’t think that’s wrong. It’s not unlike a rescue dog. A dog that’s been kicked its whole life is not going to be a warm, smiley puppy that gives love freely and that expects good things to happen all the time. He’s going to be a little bit cagey and a little bit nervous.
I think Don is that guy.
He was kicked around in his life for quite some time in his life until he decided to take charge of it himself and rewrite it. As free as you think you can feel, when you’ve created your whole identity out of whole cloth, it certainly comes with a lot of other unintended consequences that pay off down the road.
MR: Yeah, he tried to erase Adam from his life, and that turned out tragically. And at the end of last season, it felt like his family could slip away as well.
JH: Yeah, he wants Adam to move on and live his own life, and all Adam wants is to connect to his brother. And when he is rebuffed, he has nothing. He kills himself. It’s one of those unintended consequences that is a direct result of Don’s actions. Adam needed help, he needed family and Don was not willing to do that. And that’s devastating.
MR: And Don tries to recreate that perfect childhood that he never had. He wanted this mother that was an angel, but what if Betty’s not that?
Donbetty JH: Right, she’s not. She’s a human being. She’s not an angel, she’s not a perfect cipher. She is a human being who has wants and needs and everything and he’s not willing to treat her that way. At the end of last season, we started seeing that façade crack, and more of that [this season], because she is a human being and if you don’t feed that relationship, it withers and dies.
I think you see that really in every character. These are real people, making choices with how they live their lives. From Roger to Peggy to Pete to Joan, they all make these choices and have to live with them.
MR: And a lot of the choices revolve around that one goal – sort of, “I’ll get the promotion, I’ll get the corner office, I’ll get promoted to copy writer, and that will be what I want.” But then it’s not what they wanted. It doesn’t fill up that empty space.
JH: I think that’s what happens when you try to fill that empty space with stuff, whether it’s titles or objects or jobs or whatever it is, and it’s not an emotion that feeds you from the inside, it’s an object that defines you from the outside. What you end up with is sort of a shell, and emptiness inside. If anything, that’s kind of the lesson of the show, that you’ve got to tend your own garden, or it’s not going to work.
MR: I think it’s interesting that Don has this façade of the perfect suburban life, but he’s attracted to these really strong, independent women who don’t really need to rely on him for anything. Isn’t it interesting that he’s with these sort of free-spirited women who don’t conform to any stereotype?
JH: Absolutely, and I think you can look at Peggy too. For as young as she is, she’s a very independent person, and she doesn’t take a lot lying down. No pun intended. She’s young and makes a lot of young mistakes, but she’s also got [guts].
It is interesting to find that Don is attracted to those people, and sexually and romantically [with Midge and Rachel] as well. I think what ends up happening is that he either gets scared of that independence and does not like relinquishing control, or he realizes that he has this family that he has a responsibility too.
But when he goes to Rachel [late in Season 1] and says, “Let’s get out of here,” he would have done it. He obviously would have felt horrible and conflicted about it afterward. And she says, “What are you, 14? You have a family!”
MR: And that would have been the perfect example of someone re-creating the pain of their own past in their own children’s lives. Thinking about where Don is in Season 2, is there anything that you can say that will not get you in trouble?
JH: What I can say is that it’s a lot of what we established in Season 1. People are moving forward with their lives. Like Season 1, it’s a slow burn and there’s a lot of setup, you know, Matt lays a lot of track, like he did in Season 1. And the payoffs come fast and furious as they did in Season 1. It’s a beautifully structured show the writing is consistently excellent.
We have moved forward in time but our people are still our people and they’re still in the situations that they’re in. Everyone’s kind of made a big deal about, “Oh, it’s moved forward so much,” but it really hasn’t. It’s not like we’ve come back and we’re in “Swingtown.”
MR: No muttonchop sideburns for Don?
JH: [laughs] Right, not quite.
MR: I really want to see that down the road, maybe a big gold medallion.
JH: Maybe in the dream episode.
MR: Matt and I had talked about the suspense that there was in Season 1, about Don’s identity and so forth. In your mind is there as much suspense, in terms of people keeping secrets and all that?
JH: Absolutely. With Matt moving the timeline forward, we do have a big break in time and the question is, “What happened?” We have to figure out, what did he do, did he go [celebrate Thanksgiving] the next day? There are certainly a whole lot of other hanging chads from Season 1. Peggy had a kid. Harry cheated on his wife. Roger was almost dead. There’s a lot of stuff that’s still simmering.
But still, even if you remove all of that, there’s still a lot of Dick Whitman/Don Draper that is utterly unanswered. What did he do right after Korea? How did he get this incredibly high-powered job at a relatively young age? How did he meet Roger, how are they good friends? I think there’s a lot of stuff yet to be mined and an awful lot of stuff when we find out what it is, it’ll be fun and fascinating and entertaining.
SOURCE
JH: Well, making it has been – you feel like you’re swimming a marathon underwater. All the other stuff just fades into the background. I can’t do it any other way. I have to focus on what I’m doing. All that stuff happens, and you have things like interviews and Peabody Awards and trips and things like that, which are kind of mind-blowing when they happen. Obviously none of that was the case last year. So that level of distraction was not around. But the work is the same and the show is the same show, and we have the same schedule and the same people and a lot of the same directors and crew – so that all feels great, it’s all been consistent.
MR: Speaking of things that seem the same, watching the show again on DVD, and seeing a couple of episodes from this season, I was struck again by how many layers it has. As a viewer, you could focus or think about any number of things – the dialogue, the relationships, the themes, even the humor.
JH: There are certainly a lot of layers and that’s very much on purpose. It’s the kind of thing that benefits from repeat watching, like a good book. You can read a book when you’re 25 years old and when you’re 45 years old and it can mean completely different things to you. It is definitely not media to be consumed and disposed of. It stays with you. And it’s an honor to be able to work on something like that, particularly in this kind of media landscape. There’s not much out there like that.
MR: As an actor, is it the same challenge for you personally this year, or is it different?
JH: Obviously the one different feeling is this year is living up to expectation and hype. That’s much more on Matt than on any of us, but it’s still out there and I hope that we’re going to have a lot of new viewers coming to the show. You’re kind of weighing that feeling of, we are telling a story that is continuing [against,] here are some people that may be new to the show so we do have to reintroduce the gang.
But I think that’s the challenge of every season of television, you kind of start at square 1 unless it’s been running for years and years. It just feels very comfortable this year because we’ve had a whole season of being around these people. It was a lot easier to pick back up where we left off this year than it was from the pilot to Episode 2. [A year passed] between those two episodes.
MR: It’s funny, but watching Season 1 again, I was struck by the idea that we had barely scratched the surface of who these people are. Is that kind of the vibe of this season, that we’re going to find out a lot more about them?
JH: That’s kind of one of the promises that is set up in doing a show that is set in the past – it’ll move forward in time. We are very fortunate that our show is set in a time in American history where a lot of things are in transition and changing, so you don’t have to wait 10 years for a sea change to happen. They were happening almost month to month.
Watching these characters, who in many ways are very ordinary, but in other ways are extraordinary in their circumstances, live through these times, we can watch them and really feel a kinship with them. Matt did a very smart thing by placing it in this moment in time and choosing to show the passage of time, not only as it affects our characters but as it affects the world around them.
MR: That final scene of Season 1, when Don’s sitting on the steps in his house, Matt described that to me last year as, “This guy has nothing.” It made me think, what is satisfaction to this guy? I mean, obviously, that’s probably the question that will drive the entire series. But do you feel like you have any idea as to what would be satisfaction to him, what would be contentment? It’s like, he’s trying to build that and he’s sabotaging it at the same time.
JH: Right. Well, I think he’s very conflicted about what that is. He is so sure of what it is for other people, what he’s trying to sell other people. The answer for himself is much less clear and certainly less clear to him and also, the things he may think will make him happy are in conflict with the things in his life.
He may want to live a life with another woman but he has a wife and kids and a family. He may decide, which we saw a little bit of last season, that family is very important and he really wants to explore that and realize how much that means to him, but he’s done so many things to erode that. He’s kind of at sea there too. Something in Don, from his past, is so broken in so many ways that he’s got to do a lot of the work to fix that before he can truly move forward and find real happiness that is not ephemeral and meaningless.
MR: Yeah, again, watching the season again, it was like, what’s so heartbreaking about Don is that he may not know what it is to be loved, and that seriously impairs his ability to really love anyone. How do you feel about that characterization, is it wrong?
JH: I don’t think that’s wrong. It’s not unlike a rescue dog. A dog that’s been kicked its whole life is not going to be a warm, smiley puppy that gives love freely and that expects good things to happen all the time. He’s going to be a little bit cagey and a little bit nervous.
I think Don is that guy.
He was kicked around in his life for quite some time in his life until he decided to take charge of it himself and rewrite it. As free as you think you can feel, when you’ve created your whole identity out of whole cloth, it certainly comes with a lot of other unintended consequences that pay off down the road.
MR: Yeah, he tried to erase Adam from his life, and that turned out tragically. And at the end of last season, it felt like his family could slip away as well.
JH: Yeah, he wants Adam to move on and live his own life, and all Adam wants is to connect to his brother. And when he is rebuffed, he has nothing. He kills himself. It’s one of those unintended consequences that is a direct result of Don’s actions. Adam needed help, he needed family and Don was not willing to do that. And that’s devastating.
MR: And Don tries to recreate that perfect childhood that he never had. He wanted this mother that was an angel, but what if Betty’s not that?
Donbetty JH: Right, she’s not. She’s a human being. She’s not an angel, she’s not a perfect cipher. She is a human being who has wants and needs and everything and he’s not willing to treat her that way. At the end of last season, we started seeing that façade crack, and more of that [this season], because she is a human being and if you don’t feed that relationship, it withers and dies.
I think you see that really in every character. These are real people, making choices with how they live their lives. From Roger to Peggy to Pete to Joan, they all make these choices and have to live with them.
MR: And a lot of the choices revolve around that one goal – sort of, “I’ll get the promotion, I’ll get the corner office, I’ll get promoted to copy writer, and that will be what I want.” But then it’s not what they wanted. It doesn’t fill up that empty space.
JH: I think that’s what happens when you try to fill that empty space with stuff, whether it’s titles or objects or jobs or whatever it is, and it’s not an emotion that feeds you from the inside, it’s an object that defines you from the outside. What you end up with is sort of a shell, and emptiness inside. If anything, that’s kind of the lesson of the show, that you’ve got to tend your own garden, or it’s not going to work.
MR: I think it’s interesting that Don has this façade of the perfect suburban life, but he’s attracted to these really strong, independent women who don’t really need to rely on him for anything. Isn’t it interesting that he’s with these sort of free-spirited women who don’t conform to any stereotype?
JH: Absolutely, and I think you can look at Peggy too. For as young as she is, she’s a very independent person, and she doesn’t take a lot lying down. No pun intended. She’s young and makes a lot of young mistakes, but she’s also got [guts].
It is interesting to find that Don is attracted to those people, and sexually and romantically [with Midge and Rachel] as well. I think what ends up happening is that he either gets scared of that independence and does not like relinquishing control, or he realizes that he has this family that he has a responsibility too.
But when he goes to Rachel [late in Season 1] and says, “Let’s get out of here,” he would have done it. He obviously would have felt horrible and conflicted about it afterward. And she says, “What are you, 14? You have a family!”
MR: And that would have been the perfect example of someone re-creating the pain of their own past in their own children’s lives. Thinking about where Don is in Season 2, is there anything that you can say that will not get you in trouble?
JH: What I can say is that it’s a lot of what we established in Season 1. People are moving forward with their lives. Like Season 1, it’s a slow burn and there’s a lot of setup, you know, Matt lays a lot of track, like he did in Season 1. And the payoffs come fast and furious as they did in Season 1. It’s a beautifully structured show the writing is consistently excellent.
We have moved forward in time but our people are still our people and they’re still in the situations that they’re in. Everyone’s kind of made a big deal about, “Oh, it’s moved forward so much,” but it really hasn’t. It’s not like we’ve come back and we’re in “Swingtown.”
MR: No muttonchop sideburns for Don?
JH: [laughs] Right, not quite.
MR: I really want to see that down the road, maybe a big gold medallion.
JH: Maybe in the dream episode.
MR: Matt and I had talked about the suspense that there was in Season 1, about Don’s identity and so forth. In your mind is there as much suspense, in terms of people keeping secrets and all that?
JH: Absolutely. With Matt moving the timeline forward, we do have a big break in time and the question is, “What happened?” We have to figure out, what did he do, did he go [celebrate Thanksgiving] the next day? There are certainly a whole lot of other hanging chads from Season 1. Peggy had a kid. Harry cheated on his wife. Roger was almost dead. There’s a lot of stuff that’s still simmering.
But still, even if you remove all of that, there’s still a lot of Dick Whitman/Don Draper that is utterly unanswered. What did he do right after Korea? How did he get this incredibly high-powered job at a relatively young age? How did he meet Roger, how are they good friends? I think there’s a lot of stuff yet to be mined and an awful lot of stuff when we find out what it is, it’ll be fun and fascinating and entertaining.
SOURCE
