No matter what happens during the premiere of Mad Men’s fifth season on March 25, one thing won’t change. Don Draper and Peggy Olson will remain the show’s dark, beating heart—and its yin and yang, kindred spirits on opposite sides of a generational and sexual divide. Like their characters, Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss share a close professional bond and use their stints away from the office (the seventeen-month break between Mad Men’s fourth and fifth seasons was caused by creator Matthew Weiner’s protracted contract negotiations) to advance their own ambitions. (Hamm stars in the just-released Friends With Kids, directed by his longtime partner, Jennifer Westfeldt; Moss is shooting a starring role in a Sundance Channel mini-series directed by Jane Campion.) On a conference call between New York, L.A., and the south island of New Zealand, the odd couple teased us about season five and beyond.

What can you tell me about the character you’re playing in New Zealand?
Elisabeth Moss: She’s different from anyone I’ve ever played. She’s a detective and has a wall up around her emotions. I usually play vulnerable characters.

Were you longing to stretch?
EM: No. I’ve been really lucky that Peggy has changed so much since the pilot. It doesn’t get old.
Jon Hamm: [Breaking in] I have to say, that’s bullshit. Sorry to be late!
EM: Who is that?!
JH: It’s Jon Hamm. I play Don Draper!
EM: Jon, I’m really sorry. You’re not actually doing this interview anymore! It’s so awkward …
JH: I’ll just listen in.

No, I still need both of you. I’m hoping one of you will spoil season five for us. Any surprises?
JH: There are a lot of things where all of us as a cast were like, Whoa, okay. Uh, all right, so this is happening. It’s a world that’s consistently in a state of flux. There are things done that can’t be undone.

Can you be more specific?
EM: There’s something that Matt said, that these characters have to figure out what they want and how to go after it. That summed up my character.
JH: Matt has also said it’s every man for himself—that’s obviously not gender specific. Everybody is acting in their own self-interest, and that creates some pretty good dramatic tension.

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Jon Hamm strolls down a windy Manhattan street and fades anonymously into the city. With his lady love, actress Jennifer Westfeldt, by his side, he looks like any other fortysomething guy.

Except he’s not.

Tall (6-foot-2), dark, 40, fabulous and sporting, once indoors, a stylish striped crew-neck sweater with disappointingly baggy jeans, Hamm is America’s Most Wanted Man, at least to his growing fan base of Hammatics.

This month, the actor has not one but two projects to build on. First, a movie, Friends With Kids, opens next Friday. Then, after a 1½-year hiatus, Hamm reprises his starring role as the enigmatic Don Draper in TV’s critical juggernaut Mad Men.

So what happens when Season 5 finally begins March 25?

“I’m going to tell you the whole thing,” Hamm teases. Fresh from shooting, he adds gamely, “I remember most of the lines.”

His only clue on Draper, who, last we saw, was plunging frighteningly fast into his second marriage and facing career collapse: “It will be made very clear in the first few minutes where Don is.”

Also crystal-clear: Hamm refuses to rest on his Mad Men laurels. On-screen, he mischievously darts from dashing to doofus. He showed off his silly side hosting Saturday Night Live three times, played Tina Fey’s hapless beau on 30 Rock, and nailed it as a shameless stud in Oscar-nominated Bridesmaids.

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I’ll add captures from the video later tonight!

“If you’re going to be pigeonholed, ‘handsome womaniser’ isn’t the worst thing to be,” says Jon Hamm with a knowing smile, eliciting an audible swoon from the overwhelmingly female audience at London’s Curzon cinema in Mayfair last night. The former GQ Man Of The Year may have broken that mould recently with stints as Boston cop in The Town and a narcissistic brute in Bridesmaids, but we’re equally pleased to see him return as to the role that made him: Donald Draper. Taking to the stage to be interviewed by Jo Whiley about Mad Men series five followed by an audience Q&A (genuine sample question from one blushing audience member: “Can I just ask you to say my name?”), Hamm shared his thoughts on his short-lived stint in erotica, whether Don will get with Joan and what to expect from the fifth series. Here are some of the highlights…

Jon Hamm on…

His previous career as an erotic film set-dresser…
“First of all there was no penetration. It was soft-core porn. But essentially I had to move furniture around sweaty naked people. It wasn’t a great job.”

Smoking and drinking like Don
“The stress [of making Mad Men] makes me imbibe more. On the show we drink water and smoke leaves, but it’s still lighting a fire and inhaling smoke, so while it’s non-addictive, I don’t recommend it.”

Why Don never got with Joan
“Who says he hasn’t? The Don-Joan dynamic is something we do explore as the show goes on. They have worked together for a long time they know one another very well and… I’ll leave it at that.”

How the cast have fun on set
“There’s a place outside the make-up trailer with AstroTurf, like a garden, where we play dominoes and there’s a new board game every week. We’re all staggeringly competitive. We had a running series of dominos and Vincent Kartheiser is a very good player – so good he wanted to keep score. After half a season, I had 64 wins and 64 losses.”

The delay after the fourth series
“There’s studio people here so I better watch my ass! Part of what happens now in the wonderful world of media consumption that we live in is that everything is monetised. The people that own things have to determine how that money gets split up. That was a discussion that was happening at a level far higher than my pay grade but those deals had to be worked out. It was incredibly frustrating, but it’s part of the business. I wish they had said at the beginning of the show that they would pick up the show for seven years. I would have been very happy – but that’s not how it works.”

Being injured on set
“I’ve been hurt more on this show than anything I’ve done. In the first season a piece of wall fell and hit me on the head, [causing] seven stitches. That’s not funny – I had to go to the hospital! Then I broke my hand in a Korea flashback. There was an explosion and during the rehearsal I’m jumping onto this lovely soft cushion. So I jumped through and instead of landing I caught it, rolled over and heard my hand break. I went over to the director and said “I’m pretty sure I broke my hand, so can we be sure to make this in one [take]?” In the first season where I promote Peggy to copy writer, I have a removable cast – you can actually see it if you watch episode 12 or 13.”

Who he would play if not Don
“Roger Sterling – he gets all the jokes. We’d be doing a read through and I would say to John Slattery, [mimes flipping through a script] ‘Another great joke, another one, another’ and he would say, “You get to make out with her” – pointing at January Jones.”

Directing an episode in the fifth series
“The year I felt ready to do it and confident. Part of it is being confident enough to say “OK, we’ve got [the shot], let’s move on.” How am I as a director? I’m pretty laid back. I’m not a yeller or a screamer. I found it easy to direct people are essentially my friends and characters that I’ve known for years.”

What else we can expect from the new series
“The fourth season was about stripping this guy down, his family, job, everything, while also seeing an uptick in the booze and the philandering. The part that we’re getting to is him trying to repair the relationships he has broken. Don’s marriage [to Betty] did not survive season four, so that’s starting to reign in a little bit…”

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Because of the man he plays on TV, people make all kinds of crazy assumptions about him. But his “real life” is more unbelievable than you’d ever imagine.

Little-known fact: Jon Hamm owns four eagles. They sit on separate perches in his backyard. Four species of eagle: golden, tawny, Spanish Imperial, and short-toed snake.

Previously unknown: Every morning, these eagles are fed, then rotated by a robed assistant whose sole duty is to judge which of these regal birds looks most like Jon Hamm on that particular day before placing said eagle on the left-most perch. The remaining eagles are also ranked by their resemblance that day, from left to right. This puts the eagle that looks the least like Jon Hamm on a given day in shadow once the sun goes behind Hamm’s enormous seven-story garage. Amazingly, in the twelve years Hamm’s lived here, the same eagle has sat in the shadows on consecutive days only three times. Incredible.

Incidentally, rumors that The Music Man was based on the early life of Jon Hamm are entirely untrue.

Partially true fact: Jon Hamm once taught high school English at the John Burroughs School in St. Louis, his alma mater. Reputedly, Hamm was known for reading-lists comprised exclusively of Ukrainian lit (leaning heavily on Prokhasko’s The UnSimple and Volodymyr Drozd’s Everything All Over Again) and for a grim insistence that students embrace a system of writing he developed called “think drafting,” which was later adopted by both Otterbein and Bard.

Surely you already know this: After one year of teaching high school, Jon Hamm left his hometown. In a letter to this author, Hamm described the departure thusly:

I left St. Louis with $150 in my pocket and a wallet full of dangerously overdrawn credit cards. I drove out from St. Louis over the course of four or five days (staying on friends’ couches in various western states, as well as on the side of the road in Carlin, Nevada) in a 1986 Toyota Corolla that would regularly blow a radiator-fan fuse and overheat.

What you may not know: This Corolla featured an incredible talking glove box that today is accepted as one of the world’s first stand-alone nav systems. The voice? Hamm’s, of course, an ironic precursor to his current role as the voice of Mercedes-Benz commercials. Reports say the primitive system featured three commands — “Get going,” “Turn here,” and “Better bed down for the night” — issued at specific intervals from the tinny speaker of a cassette player. Hamm is known to sometimes demonstrate the system by repeatedly jabbing the play button with his index finger. (Interesting tidbit: Jon Hamm has two index fingers on his right hand.) Everyone says it really no longer sounds like Hamm at all.

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And check out this gorgeous new photoshoot!

PS: I’m looking for the scans of this new issue of Esquire. So if someone can get them, please, send them to webmaster@jon-hamm.org. Thanks

Jon Hamm has joked he’s getting his girlfriend a “bouquet of deodorant” for Valentine’s Day.

The American actor appeared on a UK radio show this morning and was amazed by the amount of gifts that listeners had sent in to celebrate the romantic holiday.

DJ Chris Moyles jokingly offered some to Jon, including flowers and body spray.

He then quizzed Jon on what it is like to be away from his girlfriend of nearly 15 years Jennifer Westfeldt on a day which is all about love.

“Humiliating. What I wisely did was I arranged for something to be sent before I left,” he explained. “When she gets her bouquet of deodorant she’ll know I’m thinking of her from across the Atlantic.”

Jon and Jennifer have been working on a movie together recently. It’s called Friends with Kids and stars Megan Fox, Kristen Wiig and Chris O’Dowd.

Jon and his partner financed the release themselves so it was more stressful than making a normal film, but they still enjoyed spending so much time together.

“It’s a fun ensemble romantic comedy, it’s a little edgier than most. We’ve been together going on 15 years, It’s great, it’s fun… making a movie is hard work, especially when you don’t have a studio behind you. It’s a lot more than just a day,” he explained.

The actor was asked whether he and Jennifer drove to work together each day, which they did. However, he was keen to point out who was behind the wheel.

“Yes, sure,” he replied, before being quizzed on whether Jennifer drove. “No, no, no, God no.”

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Chris O’Dowd talks about Jon in the latest issue of GQ uk:

Do you feel any pressure when you’re standing next to Jon Hamm?
When you’re dealing with Jon, it doesn’t matter what I f***ing wear! It’s not like if I’m wearing a nicer suit I’m going to be more attractive than Jon Hamm. It’s a drop in the ocean of the chasm between us! [laughs] Jon’s great. He’s got a wicked little sense of humour – much more silly than you would imagine. I was doing This Is Forty with Paul Rudd last summer and Paul would be getting these filthy joke texts and pictures through from Jon. They have known each other forever – it’s the same with the Judd Apatow people because they’ve known each other since they were kids. That’s why the work looks so strong and everyone is so comfortable.

Did he share anything about the new series of Mad Men?
No! As far as I know he generally has no clue what’s going on. Like all actors in those jobs you tend to find out pretty late. But it’s a fantastic show – he’s directing an episode in the new series.

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Wearing a black tailored suit, swirling a drink in his right hand, Jon Hamm might as well be Don Draper. But Hamm is only drinking water with lime at the Television Critics Association party and he’s fielding questions deftly, unlike the character he plays on Mad Men, whose answers to a journalist on the season four premiere ended resulted in trouble for his firm.
As approximately 10 reporters pin Hamm in a corner with their recording devices thrust in his face, he speaks eagerly about Draper, his love for his day job and the relationship between Peggy and Don.

Anyone who has ever caught a glimpse of Mad Men knows that alcohol plays an important role in the series, especially with Don.
“I think he has a dangerous relationship with alcohol that a lot of creative people have. And fill in the blank with either alcohol or whatever. It’s a depressant, yet it uninhibits you creatively. It’s a fine line and Don has crossed it many times… [but] Don recognized that and seems to have backed away from the edge a bit.”

Draper, of course, also loves women. In the season four finale, we were left with the indelible image of Don in bed with his brand new twenty-something fiancé, Megan. She’s sleeping on his chest and he turns and stares out the window thoughtfully. When prodded about just what Draper may have been pondering at that moment, Hamm slyly avoided the question.

“Yes, he was in fact thinking of something,” the actor admitted.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed in Draper with the way season four ended. I kept asking myself how it is that Don is so creative with his work, but ends up seemingly moving backwards in his personal life, becoming engaged to his secretary in record time. Responded Hamm to this quasi paradox:
“Don makes his money and his livelihood on being creatively ahead of the curve, and finding out what makes people tick. And what happens when you get older? And there’s another generation of people coming up right behind you who are out-moving you and out-thinking you? What happens to a creative person? Don is getting older. It’s not The Simpsons where everyone stays the same age 20 years in. People age and we try and depict that realistically.”

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HuffPost caught up with the cast — including Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss, Christina Hendricks, John Slattery, January Jones and creator Matthew Weiner — who were all as tight-lipped as ever about what to expect next season. They would only non-jokingly joke that they’ll get fired if they say anything. (They will.)

The “Mad Men” cast did, however, have some things to say about the new season. “I think this season is the best yet. I really do,” Slattery said. “We were all commenting that it felt like the first season. We’ve somehow circled back after all the details and all the plot development that’s happened with everybody … it’s kind of circled back to the sort of tunnel vision on each character and various elements of each character that they’ve dialed in on. It’s somehow simpler.”

Do his castmates agree? “This season I think is our best season, script-wise. 100 percent,” said Rich Sommer, who plays Harry Crane. “I really can’t imagine how anyone would be disappointed, and I think that it definitely rewards those people who have been there from the beginning. It’s not a show you can start from the middle … well, you can, but you’ll not only miss information, you’ll miss nuance. There are literally glances that happen between two characters where it’s like, ‘Oh shit!’”

“A lot happens this season!,” Hendricks agreed. “A lot of last season, we were wondering what was happening with Don Draper, what was happening with his marriage. But every character experiences so much this year. It’s very exciting.”

“I heard something that Matt [Weiner] said tonight,” Moss said, “which is that this season is about every man for himself. I just thought that was so interesting … I’d never heard him say it before, but I think that is the most perfect way of describing this season. And I think that’s the parallel to Season 1 as well.”

Speaking of Season 1 — and all the previous seasons — the castmates had to answer an even tougher question: What’s your favorite “Mad Men” episode ever?

Jon Hamm (Don Draper)

“My favorite episode is still the pilot ['Smoke Gets In Your Eyes']. It was just such an amazing experience, and the first step in this incredible journey. But I’ve never ever worked on something and felt the way I felt after we shot the episode in Season 4 called ‘The Suitcase’ [Episode 7]. That one … I can’t even put it into words, but that one over there [pointing to Elisabeth Moss] is so talented and it was such a lovely performance. It was really just great to be able to say those words next to that person.”

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Personal responsibility has never been a strength of many of the Mad Men characters, but when Season 5 begins on March 25, series creator Matthew Weiner promises that each of them will have to deal with a changing world on their own — a task that might be more difficult than any of them had imagined.

“And the other thing is — and it really just kept coming up and it’s actually in the show — I’ve never talked about this before, where the line is in the show in episode three and it’s ‘When is everything going to get back to normal?’”

After being off the air since October 2010 — and missing the awards season in the process — fans will at least have a sense of normalcy when it finally returns. But since the undercurrent — or B storyline — to every season of Mad Men has been the changing world outside the walls of the agency, there might be more emphasis on how societal and political changes affect the lives of the characters in dramatic new ways.

Of course, Weiner, famous for protecting even minor plot points, wouldn’t reveal what year Season 5 is set in, but he didn’t see that as overly important.

“The year doesn’t really mean anything,” Weiner said. “It doesn’t. I’m not doing a history lesson. The thing that I’m excited about is I wanted to give people a big helping. I wanted a two-hour premiere. It’s a Mad Men movie — I don’t think anyone’s going to think it’s two episodes spliced together. There is a story that starts in the middle of it [but otherwise] it’s one story. The beginning and the ending are related to each other.”

Weiner, who was at AMC’s Mad Men cocktail reception on Saturday night (along with the cast) held court for the first time in ages. Later in the evening I was able to pull him aside with another critic and talk in-depth about the show and the pressure surrounding it as it enters its fifth season.
Weiner on a central theme this season: “We talked about ‘life isn’t fair’ before on the show, but the realization of, like, you really have to deal with your own problems by yourself and other people are not interested — that self-interest can be a surprise, especially if you’re trying to be good.”

Is that the new normal? “Yeah. And I feel like that’s the way it is right now. That’s what I feel we’re undergoing — such tremendous change. Technological, cultural, social, our perception of ourselves as a country, our perception of each other. The country really feels like a melting pot, like it’s culturally diverse as ever and representative. And at the same time I personally — I don’t know what period I’m looking to — but I don’t feel like my feet are on the ground. And what you realize is, this is the way it is.”

“What I mean is that we have a show that’s about people’s personal lives and about people’s jobs. And obviously the office is a big part of it and we take it very seriously — these are ambitious people. But there is a certain point where you have to start thinking for yourself and a lot of behavior that you would judge as very negative or destructive or whatever, that is the only way to achieve what you want. If you sit and wait there for someone to give you everything in life there is a very good chance you won’t get it. And that can be an earth-shattering thing about understanding the world. And you take someone like Don, who we know is trying to be a better person. That’s part of what [the audience] likes about him. They see that there is virtue in this man from the pilot. The fact that he’s talking to that busboy — he’s an African-American man in his 50s — and immediately he cuts through everything to see that, well, this is a human being’s opinion. You see someone there who’s got a virtue in their trust of other people and is a bit of a chameleon and curious and open and all of these things we’ve talked about. But Don’s maneuver at the end of last season was really, really selfish and he may have saved the business, but that’s what I’m talking about. It’s like, how long does it take to learn that lesson? And that’s a big part of the season.”

Read the full article: The Hollywood Reporter

People magazine has carved out a niche for itself in determining the world’s sexiest men… Tough job. In this Bold Face we highlight three men who have made the list…

Jon Hamm was named one of People magazine’s Sexiest Men Alive in 2008 and the magazine has singled him out again this year on their website as being a strong contender for the title in the future. That must be gratifying news for his partner of 10 years, Jennifer Westfeldt, who directed, wrote, produced and also stars alongside him in his latest film project Friends with Kids which will be out in theaters next April. Of course, we all know him as Don Draper in AMC’s Mad Men, which returns in March 2012. If you can’t wait till then to get your fix, here is the dapper Draper in the Lacoste L119S sunglasses from Marchon…

Source: Vision Monday