Let’s start with his head. When’s the last time you saw a profile like that? Blasted out of granite. The kind of square-jawed profile that stars used to have—before leading men were all replaced by wispy boys who had faces that had never seen a razor, let alone a five-o’clock shadow.

Not Jon Hamm.

The man’s got a head on his broad shoulders.

And everyone who watched AMC’s Mad Men was mesmerized by that mug. Not only the Brylcreem-loving handsomeness of it but also trying to figure out just what the hell is going on inside it-—inside the head of Hamm’s instantly iconic character, Don Draper.

“Don Draper is my father,” Hamm, 36, tells me over breakfast in Los Feliz, California, where he lives. “My dad was that guy. He was that guy living the American Dream in 1960s America. He owned a trucking company in St. Louis. Everyone in town knew him. He was the life of the party. But there was an incredible sadness inside him, too. Unfortunately, he died when I was 20, so I never got to know him man-to-man. Draper is my attempt to know him better.”

Now Hamm is adjusting to being recognized in public. “Brylcreem tends to make the difference. If I have it in, it happens. If not, I can usually slip in and out.” He pauses. “Though less and less. The nice part is that I’m getting meetings I never used to get. It’s like that line in the show: ‘A man is whatever room he is in.’ I’m in the right rooms a lot more now.”

By Michael Hainey