Salon.com > Jon Hamm

Jon Hamm is right about Kim Kardashian

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 20:05:00 +0000

Don't ever change, Don Draper. In an instantly notorious interview for the U.K. edition of Elle magazine, World's Greatest Dreamboat and former Salon Sexiest Man Jon Hamm has dared to admit that the appeal of reality TV stars "doesn't make any sense" to him, and that "Whether it's Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian or whoever, stupidity is certainly celebrated. Being a f***ing idiot is a valuable commodity in this culture because you’re rewarded significantly." And faster than you can pour your third martini, the tabs have been lapping up that money quote as evidence of a celebrity feud.

Sure enough, the woman who was Mrs. Kris Humphries for 72 days swiftly banged out a reasonably articulate response Monday, tweeting that "I respect Jon and I am a firm believer that everyone is entitled to their own opinion and that not everyone takes the same path in life. We're all working hard and we all have to respect one another. Calling someone who runs their own businesses, is a part of a successful TV show, produces, writes, designs, and creates, 'stupid,' is in my opinion careless." She then promptly tweeted four pouty photographs of herself as she publicly mused how blond she ought to go. And ... the prosecution rests, America.

Zach Galifianakis, Will Ferrell and the best of “Between Two Ferns”

Thu, 26 May 2011 18:01:00 +0000

The best talk show on the Internet might be the perennially awkward "Between Two Ferns." Why can't they just replace Jay Leno with Zach Galifianakis? I keep writing NBC, but no one will give me a straight answer.

That being said, the latest "Ferns" episode with Will Ferrell just doesn't do it for me the way some of the earlier episodes do. Sure, there's a quick visit from Jon Hamm, a former "BTF" guest, and a wonderful fruit-eating sequence, but it may be that what made these shows so funny in the first place -- mainly Zach's sweaty awkwardness and mean-spirited jealousy toward his guests -- is a little less believable now that he's a legitimate movie star himself.

(Warning: This video feature some monkey/frog sex that is NSFW.)

Jon Hamm and Jennifer Westfeldt: The new Camelot couple?

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:01:00 +0000

There is something oddly familiar about the relationship between "Mad Men" actor Jon Hamm and his long-term girlfriend, writer/director/actress Jennifer Westfeldt. Maybe it's the nostalgia factor that follows Hamm around even in contemporary settings, but seeing the two of them together on red carpets always makes me think of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, minus all the anger issues, and that whole "being married" bit.

Maybe a better comparison would be Sam Shepard and Jessica Lange: both famous in their own right, both low-key presences entirely devoid of tabloid drama, and yet completely compelling to watch together. Jon and Jessica just always look so in love, dammit. Not that I (or the thousands of other women who watch "Mad Men" for the, uh, costume design) begrudge them their happiness. If anything, they are a classy Hollywood throwback: what I imagine L.A. was like before Harvey Levin showed up.

Look at how lovely they are even while (seemingly) wasted during a pre-Emmys party in 2009!

“Mad Men” gets the green light for season five, but not till 2012

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 18:30:00 +0000

America has been anxiously biting its nails for news about "Mad Men," AMC's nostalgic hit show about misogynistic ad men in the 60s. Despite critical acclaim and a cult fan base, "Mad Men" fate has been up in the air regarding its fifth season, due to stalled negotiations between producers Lionsgate, AMC, and the show's creator and executive producer, Matthew Weiner. This time last week we were wondering if "Mad Men" would even make an appearance in 2011. Well, today we got our answer.

The official statement from AMC:

"AMC has officially authorized production of season 5 of Mad Men, triggering our option with Lionsgate. While we are getting a later start than in years past due to ongoing, key non-cast negotiations, Mad Men will be back for a fifth season in early 2012."

Negotiations stall on “Mad Men”

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 21:23:00 +0000

If "Mad Men" doesn't come back for a fifth season, I'm blaming Rich Sommer. No, I know it's not the fault of the actor and writer who plays Harry Crane on AMC's critical darling that negotiations have dragged out this long, but he's the one who got us worried about the possibility. And now that there's officially a "problem" (in so far as the news of a setback is no longer gossip, but a story for the New York Times), I can't help feeling like I could have had at least four blissful months of ignorance if Rich hadn't tweeted back in November that he didn't know whether the show was going to come back on.

Rich quickly qualified his tweet -- saying that he was just referring to the lack of an official statement regarding a pickup for next season -- but he was obviously concerned, which made us concerned. Why wouldn't "Mad Men" get picked up for another season, when it's won so many awards and garnered such critical praise?

What should we name our “Sexiest Men” feature?

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 19:17:00 +0000

Next week, Salon debuts one of our most popular annual features: Our collection of the 15 sexiest men, selected by a hair-pulling process of rigorous debate and slammed doors. The feature first began in 2006 as creative counter-programming to People's drab, one-dimensional list. We like pretty boys, too, but we grew tired of their cheesy monopoly on attractiveness: Sexiness is a complex algorithm of humor, intelligence, weirdness, talent -- not just a contest of perfect abs and jutting jaws. And so our "Sexiest Man Living!" list was born, with such winners as Stephen Colbert (2006), and Jon Hamm, way back in 2007.

“The Town”: Ben Affleck’s Boston fantasy

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 14:01:00 +0000

It's tough not to root for Ben Affleck, a genuinely likable guy who has risen from indie-film outsider to become a major Hollywood star, and now seems partway through a mid-career shift behind the camera. His first feature as a director, the dark 2007 crime thriller "Gone Baby Gone," was imperfect but admirably intense, and captured the clannish, claustrophobic atmosphere of author Dennis Lehane's Irish-American Boston neighborhoods convincingly. But I detect troubling signs of celebrity malaise in Affleck's new film, "The Town," which you can't even describe as more of the same. It's less of the same.

For one thing, the material here -- a screenplay written by Affleck, Peter Craig and Aaron Stockard, based on Chuck Hogan's novel -- is closer to a mediocre, generic imitation of Lehane than to the real thing. "The Town" refers to Charlestown, another of those Bah-sten nay-buh-hoods where guys with pseudo-Celtic tattoos and too much silver jewelry stand around and talk in unnecessary expositional detail about how they grew up together and love each other's drunken moms and dads. Check out my last name -- I am personally aware that such places and people still exist. It's still an act of odd, racially tinged nostalgia to focus so lovingly on the diminishing white-ethnic criminal class amid the much wider range of evil available in 21st-century America.

Emmy nominations: Who got snubbed?

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 15:30:00 +0000

Joel McHale and Sofia Vergara aren't a bad way to wake up at 5:30, what with the boobs and the height and the funny, but it'd be nice if a distinctly West Coast medium like television could have the decency to operate on a more humane West Coast time. Please.

That said, I was pleasantly surprised a few times with the 2010 Emmy nominations, and was, per usual, irritated just as often. Tony Shalhoub, again, for real? (eye roll) "Two and a Half Men" taking up valuable space in any category? (bigger eye roll) And why Aaron Paul of "Breaking Bad" didn't submit his reel in the lead actor category is confounding and shameful -- Bryan Cranston is, arguably, the star of that show but this was Paul's year. His performance as the now-sober meth cooker Jesse Pinkman was, in a word, eviscerating.

Mad Man on SNL: Hamm on wry

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:02:00 +0000

Jon Hamm totally does it for us. He's absurdly easy on the eyes. He regularly seduces us on "Mad Men," as a guy so brooding, so emotionally withholding, so fantastically messed up, we'd cut off a finger if the Blue Fairy would just make him real and send him on over. But the clincher – proven by his prior appearances on "Saturday Night Live" and "30 Rock" – is that he's deftly, disarmingly funny.

Making a repeat appearance on "SNL" this weekend, Hamm didn't just milk easy laughs out of his supercool Don Draper persona (though he did that too). Nope, what really got us hot and bothered was his eagerness to take off his shirt – revealing a body so downright normal it was almost cuddly.

In a digital short early in the episode, Hamm was Sergio, the well-oiled, ponytailed, saxophone-playing manifestation of a Gypsy curse. Tormenting Andy Samberg with his smooth jazz, he loomed over his victim, flaunting visible muffin top. Later, he was Scott Brown, a studly, persistently shirtless fantasy figure in the minds of his Democratic foes. (Gyrating in Nancy Pelosi's imagination, he tells her, "I want to introduce something to the floor. It's called: Your panties.")

The dream life of Don Draper

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 10:08:00 +0000

Responsibilities are really a mixed bag of nuts, one that's filled with lots of half-stale almonds and not nearly enough cashews. We need responsibilities to give our life structure. But when we get them, we tug at our scratchy collared shirts and whine endlessly about how carefree and artistically fulfilled and emotionally self-actualized we'd be if we didn't have quite so many stupid responsibilities taking up all of our time and making us miserable.

What we forget is that life without responsibilities is a formless void, an empty chasm that we trudge through listlessly, longing for to-do lists. We aim to roam the world like Goldmund, the pleasure seeker in Herman Hesse's "Narcissus and Goldmund," but instead we only lie on a dirty rug, trying desperately to conjure up the energy to walk down to the corner store for something chocolatey, filled with whipped cream.

Even so, life with responsibilities is just like one of those mazes made of bushes they put in British gardens for self-hating Brits to torture themselves with. One minute you think you're strolling along at a leisurely pace like the heroine of a Jane Austen novel, the next minute you're confused, bleeding, sobbing and covered in thorny brambles, and the last five hours are a complete blank. That, and you're surrounded by dirty laundry, hungry children, resentful domesticated animals and a drunk stranger who claims to be your spouse.

Critics’ Picks: Secrets of “Mad Men”

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:22:00 +0000

"Mad Men," second season DVD

One of Matt Weiner's favorite shots in all of "Mad Men" arrives in the second episode of the second season: Peggy Olson, prim secretary turned crack copywriter, lies on the bed of her cramped Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment the morning after a late-night bash. She is still wearing her smart, modest red party dress, now billowing out across the rumpled sheets. "It's just luscious," Weiner says of the shot, and he's right: The camera peers down at her from high above -- her right arm splayed to the side, knees collapsed to the left, her room an artful tangle of clothes tossed across furniture and abandoned in heaps on the floor. Lasting all of 15 seconds, it's a scene even a careful viewer might miss, but for anyone fascinated by the ever-evolving Peggy, one of the show's most compelling characters, it contains a clue: The tightly coiled good girl and relentless worker bee turns out to be a bit of a slob.

Finale wrap-up: “Mad Men”

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 14:15:00 +0000

"Pete, just tell the truth. Don't worry about the outcome. People respect that." -- Peggy Olson

The truth finally came out during the second-season finale of "Mad Men," but it wasn't embraced as enthusiastically as Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) suggested it might be.

But then, most of the characters on Matthew Weiner's stylish, smart drama can't handle the truth -- and clearly would prefer not to know it. This stunning fact was most evident in Don Draper's stricken face as his wife Betty somberly informed him, in the finale's final scene, that she was pregnant with their third child. Betty (January Jones) might as well have told Don (Jon Hamm) that nuclear bombs were falling on Manhattan, the way he flinched and grimaced and held her hand in a gesture of resigned solidarity.

But then, Don Draper always seems to imagine that the world will conform to his needs without unnecessary discussion, even after one of his extended disappearances. After spending three weeks away in California, first with a young nomadic trust funder (who seems to represent total freedom from conventional responsibilities), then with the widow of the man whose identity he stole (who, surprisingly, appears to be the only person Don is truly open with, and who hints at the possibility of real honesty, intimacy and lasting commitment to one woman), Don returns to Betty, but merely tells her, "I had to have some time to think about things."

Stark, raving mad

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:00:00 +0000

"Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern." -- Frank O'Hara, "Mayakovsky"

When Don Draper reads these words at the start of the second season of AMC's "Mad Men," he uncovers the show's growing concern with the question of identity. Don (Jon Hamm) is no longer struggling to conceal his lineage or real name -- that was his dark secret during the first season. He's successfully pulled off the magic trick of becoming a new person, but now he's left with the sticky task of accepting the person he's chosen to become. How will his identity -- which is, after all, more constructed and invented than most -- withstand direct challenges to its integrity? In the wake of his long lost brother's suicide, is he still willing to compromise his core beliefs and values for the sake of maintaining the life he's chosen?

Sexiest Man Living 2007

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 11:00:00 +0000

Our alternative to that annual Bible of Sexy -- with its catalog of lantern jaws, bulging biceps and Seacrest hair -- struck such a rich chord with you last year that it's back, and looks to be here for good. We've got 26 more men that, sure, are easy on the eyes, but who also unleash complicated emotions in us that we just have never been able to articulate. Until now.

So without further ado, the winner of our Second Annual Sexiest Man Living Award is ...

The year's hottest man!
Who: Jon Hamm
Age: 36
Know him as: Don Draper on AMC's "Mad Men"

Watching AMC's "Mad Men" is a sensual feast. Matthew Weiner's devotion to getting 1960 right means we feel Joan's girdle and Peggy's scratchy dresses, taste the rye and the steak and the oysters, glory in the pastels of Betty's peignoirs; our eyes water at the end of every episode from all that cigarette smoke. The sexual politics are remarkable; the sex is even more interesting, and the hot center of it all is Jon Hamm, who plays Sterling Cooper creative director Don Draper, haunted, predatory, at the top of his game, miserable.