Jon Hamm Finds His Way Back to the Hilltop

As we ascended the trail into Griffith Park, Jon Hamm gazed up at the scrubby ridge to our left. From our perspective, the ridgeline traced a clean horizon, uninterrupted by cell towers or midcentury modern palaces. He nodded toward a man sitting up there alone.

“See that dude sitting on the point there?” he asked. I looked: The dude could have been meditating or having a Don Draper moment, dreaming up the next big Coca-Cola campaign.

For Hamm, the image of the man brought him back to 2017, when he first moved to the Hollywood Hills. His career-making, Emmy-winning role as Draper in the AMC drama “Mad Men” had ended two years before, as had a romantic partnership of 18 years. It had been by most accounts, including his, a tough period of transition.

“I was newly single — I was like, I just need to concentrate on myself again,” he recalled with some apparent wistfulness. “And I would just take this walk, every day,” to the top of that ridge, and then back toward his house, memorizing lines along the way.

Eventually he began to settle into his new home, his new neighborhood, his new rhythm. He turned a corner, pushed ahead.

We had met up that sunny late-February afternoon, along with Hamm’s beloved rescue dog, Murphy, to hike and talk about his new Apple TV+ drama, “Your Friends & Neighbors,” his first lead TV role since playing Draper a decade earlier.

Draper, a brilliant and enigmatic ad executive, had been singular, a defining character not only for Hamm but also in the pantheon of antiheroes from prestige TV’s golden age.

It is also a role that Hamm, 54, spent the years just after “Mad Men” trying in some ways to cast off. In those days, the ones that sent him wandering Griffith Park, success after Draper hardly seemed assured. Articles from that time bore headlines like “Jon Hamm’s Second Act,” “So, What Now, Jon?” and “Jon Hamm Is Ready to Break Free From Don Draper.”

“It doesn’t matter how awesome or successful or genre-defining, career-defining” a thing is, he said. “As soon as it’s over, everyone’s like, What’s next?”

What came next for Hamm was largely a series of quirky guest roles and supporting roles on TV and a run of movies that reaped decidedly mixed results, the upshot being that there weren’t many headlines of any sort for a while. But it seems obvious now that however one defines Hamm’s second act, he is easing into a third. It is an act defined so far by a string of high-profile TV roles (“Fargo,” “Landman,” “The Morning Show”); by an invitation to introduce the Kansas City Chiefs at Super Bowl LIX; and by his first “S.N.L.” hosting gig in 15 years, airing this weekend. Suddenly, he is everywhere again.

He also feels freer now to play with that Draper-like persona, he said. (Witness his “Mad Men” spoof with his former co-star John Slattery in “Unfrosted” last year, in which they propose rebranding Pop Tarts as “Jelle Jolie.”) Hamm’s new series, which premieres on Friday, is in some ways a return to the themes, style and wardrobe that made him famous. As the slick hedge funder Andrew Cooper, his character seems at least partly predicated on viewers’ memories of Draper.

“There’s something to be said for that,” Hamm, who is also an executive producer, acknowledged. “There’s also something to be said for subverting that.” “Your Friends & Neighbors” is ultimately a crime caper and a critique of conspicuous consumption. As Hamm put it, “Don was a seller, and Coop is a buyer.”

Perhaps most important, this is the act in which Hamm became a happily married man, at peace with where he is, with his past, his inner critic — a peace, he said, that he has begun to find in only the past five years.

Still, as Draper once said, “People tell you who they are, but we ignore it because we want them to be who we want them to be,” and something about Hamm seems to invite such projection. Whatever that ineffable quality is, it is more than handsomeness. Jennifer Aniston, his “Morning Show” co-star, said he was “covered in fairy dust.” The “Fargo” creator, Noah Hawley, noted “the mystery of what you can’t see,” which makes people “want to keep watching.”

For viewers of a certain demographic and disposition — in its final season, “Mad Men” drew less than a quarter of the audience of AMC’s zombie hit “The Walking Dead” — Hamm’s image as the tortured, brooding hunk may be indelible.

And yet, what if behind those projections onto that broad Gibraltar of a face was mostly just a hardworking son of St. Louis, who had taken some knocks but refused to dwell on them? What if these days, he is mostly a normal guy who loves his wife and his dog? Can we imagine Jon Hamm happy?

IF YOU EVER FIND yourself hiking with Jon Hamm, expect a lot of questions from friends, family and colleagues afterward. They will want to know what he is like. A surprising number of otherwise sober-minded people will want to know whether he was wearing shorts (he was) and what kind they were (loose, athletic). Such is the effect the mere idea of Jon Hamm’s shorts has on people’s imaginations.

Plenty of actors are handsome. Hamm has a slightly old-school, barrel-chested masculinity that, unlike much of what passes for manliness in the manosphere age, is also funny and self-deprecating, with an air of cultivated detachment. You believe him in a cowboy hat. You believe him in reading glasses.

“You can go deep with Jon — like, we’ve shared some tears, in a good way,” said Aniston, whose character in “The Morning Show,” which she executive produces, gets into a romantic affair with Hamm’s character in Season 3. “So he’s also a really good listener, and a great communicator.”

Amanda Peet, who plays Cooper’s still very present ex-wife in “Your Friends & Neighbors,” joked about Hamm’s tendency to vex even assured men like her husband, the writer and producer David Benioff (“Game of Thrones”).

“I’ve worked with Ben Affleck, Mark Ruffalo, Ethan Hawke, John Cusack, Ashton Kutcher, and like, my husband is not the jealous type — he would barely bat an eyelid,” she said. “But by the time the fourth friend of ours was like, ‘How are you doing with her working with Jon Hamm?,’ he started to be like, ‘What the [expletive]?’”

Some men might prefer Hamm to be a bad guy. Unfortunately for them, he does not seem to be a bad guy. For one thing, he loves his dog. He shares pictures of Murphy on set. He shares pictures of Murphy when you’re already hanging out with Murphy.

He’ll interrupt himself midsentence just to make a quick observation in Murphy-voice, from Murphy’s P.O.V. (“This is pretty good dirt,” went one voice-over. “This is really good, guys, I dunno if you’ve tried this dirt.”) Like many pups, Murphy, an 85-pound bulldog mix, functions as an avatar of his owner — he too is a friendly, bull-necked orphan who has risen to the Hollywood Hills.

“I see about 15 pictures of Murphy every day,” Peet said. “It’s like right on the line between endearing and psychotic.”

Hamm calls you “buddy” and says things like “holy cow” and “cool beans.” The “Mad Men” creator, Matthew Weiner, who first praised him as a great and thoughtful actor and “a very artistic person,” also said this: “He would like to be seen, himself, as a nerd, I think. And he is nerdy. But he is also a jock.”

Historically, there are reasons for Hamm’s fans to assume he is existentially conflicted. Draper’s darkness was irresistible, deeply literary and steeped in manly trauma, and that is part of it. But there is also Hamm’s biography: He lost his mother at 10, and then his father at 20. More than most, he had to summon the wherewithal to succeed on his own.

“I was a late bloomer in every sense,” he said. “As my therapist would say, I’ve always been kind of surviving, and only in the last 20 years or so have I been able to really participate in life in the way that my friends that had normal adolescences growing up” could. He worked various jobs beginning at age 16, including as a teacher after college, and moved to Los Angeles at 24.

“If you wanted something, get a [expletive] job and go get it, go do it,” he said.

Unlike many people with humble origins, Hamm rarely lacked confidence, said Robert Lawson, a friend since high school. It helped that Hamm was good-looking, played football. It helped that friends and other families supported him, particularly after his father died.

“All of our parents always loved Jon,” said Lawson, now a communications executive in Tokyo. His own parents let Hamm live in the basement after college, even after Lawson moved out. (Lawson’s parents, Vic and Linda, were among the people Hamm thanked in his 2015 Emmy acceptance speech.)

“He was always this fun, smart, respectful guy with a magnetic personality,” Lawson said. “So he always had somewhere to stay.”

Success with “Mad Men” came relatively late, in Hamm’s mid-30s, and it was incandescent. Suddenly the paparazzi were always parked outside his house and shining lights in his face as he exited a restaurant or bar.

As “Mad Men” ended, in 2015, there were signs of strain. A cascade of difficulties swamped his personal life: He separated from his longtime partner, the actress and screenwriter Jennifer Westfeldt; he went to rehab for alcohol addiction; an old fraternity hazing episode, in which the victim needed medical treatment, was resurfaced by reporters. (Hamm was charged with hazing but ultimately not convicted.)

“It’s like anything else, there’s no way over but through, right?” he said in a later video call about the challenges of that time. “You can avoid it, or you can not deal with it, but it doesn’t make it go away. You have to kind of go through the steps.”

But he worked hard, meanwhile, not to be typecast. He turned down roles that seemed too Draper-like and avoided working with other “Mad Men” alumni. He did thrillers (“Baby Driver,” “Beirut”). He did more comedy, a lot of it (“Confess, Fletch,” “30 Rock,” “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”).

His attempts to become a go-to leading man in the movies met with middling box-office success. “Does that say that the audience doesn’t want to see me in movies?” he said. “I don’t know; I don’t think so. I think that there’s so many other things that go into it.” But he established his range and comedic bona fides, and he landed roles in some of the biggest movies around, like “Top Gun: Maverick.”

The work was varied and steady. A few years after moving to the hills, he began a relationship in earnest with the actress Anna Osceola, now his wife, whom he had met while taping the final “Mad Men” episode — the one with Draper’s Coca-Cola meditation. His new house became a home. Hamm doesn’t have children, but he said he hopes for them — a good sign he wasn’t bluffing on the whole happiness thing.

Those who know him well attest to his newfound contentment, to the progress he has made since the period when “Mad Men” was ending — “a really tough time,” as Lawson described it.

“Drinking with Jon Hamm during those days was different than having a drink with Jon Hamm now,” he said. “He definitely has come out on the other side,” he added, “and I think meeting Anna was such a great thing. He is as happy as I have ever seen him.” (Hamm does still have the occasional drink and said people often wrongly assume that “I’m off the wagon” because of his short rehab stint. “I’ve never claimed to be a sober person,” he said.)

As his co-star in “Mad Men,” Slattery saw firsthand “the real rocket ride” Hamm was on for a while. As his friend, he sees where he is now.

“He just makes sound decisions, despite whatever pressures may have been applied externally and internally,” he said. “I’m just happy that he’s in the place he’s in.”

THE HAMM OF “Your Friends & Neighbors” will seem familiar at first, as the promotional material showing him in a tuxedo already does. The role seems custom made for him. Jonathan Tropper, the show’s creator, said that in many ways it was. The nods to Draper weren’t accidental.

“There’s no denying that the man knows how to wear a suit,” Tropper said. He approached Hamm as he was still writing the pilot because he couldn’t imagine anyone else in the role.

“It’s very hard to quantify,” he said. “He has this characteristic where he can behave badly, but you will still want to understand him and root for him.”

That was vital because his character does behave badly. In the second scene, we see Cooper sitting alone and Draper-like at a bar in a suit, tie loosened, whisky in hand, as an attractive younger woman sidles up with some compelling ideas. This comes after a scene, however, in which he wakes up covered in someone else’s blood.

“That’s the fun of having a relatively lengthy career,” Hamm said. “You can play both sides of that kind of expectation.”

We climbed the hill back toward his house. His wife was home getting ready for Oscars parties, and he would need to get ready soon, too. He seemed excited. It was fun to think that in his baseball cap, aviators and sneakers he had passed virtually unnoticed through the park, but soon he would put on a nice shirt and no one could miss him.

“It’s just good to be part of the conversation again,” he said. Experience had taught him to be patient, to trust — “This, too, shall pass” was a phrase he twice invoked — and it seemed to be paying off.

“Part of the challenge is having the wherewithal, having the confidence, to say, It’s going to take a minute,” he said. “I know that there will be opportunities to come, and I want take a minute to sit.”

Additional camera operator: Pilot Lee.