Jon Hamm Runs Deep
In his new show Your Friends & Neighbors, the Mad Men actor has satisfied his three main criteria: a non-Draper-esque character, a strong point of view, and a plot you can’t look away from.
PHOTOGRAPHY Magnus Unnar
STYLED BY Warren Alfie Baker
In the scene that opens Your Friends & Neighbors, a new Apple Original series starring Jon Hamm, a young woman slides up next to Hamm’s character, hedge fund manager Andrew “Coop” Cooper. After a few moments’ repartee, the woman assesses him: “You have this strange mix of confidence and low self-esteem.” Coop, it emerges, is recently single, his wife (Amanda Peet) having left him for a professional athlete. He is in what he thinks is the nadir of his adulthood, though soon he’ll bore much deeper down into rock bottom. He and the woman, a colleague, sleep together, and the encounter—which, both parties later attest, was consensual and considerate of her and his positions within their company—fires Coop into a vortex of unfortunate events.
Though Your Friends & Neighbors is unlike Mad Men, the series that fired Hamm, 54, into a vortex of very fortunate events, it’s easy to picture a casting director reading the show’s synopsis and immediately thinking of Hamm: his Mad Men character Don Draper, too, was a compelling mix of confidence and brokenness.
It’s also easy to picture Hamm being drawn to such a detailed portrait of one man. He is a frequent reader of biographies, he tells me on an afternoon in early February. He is calling from his office, and now he studies the contents of his bookshelf—60 percent fiction and 40 percent nonfiction, he estimates. He currently has three books in play, all biographies, and recently finished a new one of Lorne Michaels, whom he has known for years. “I didn’t really know anything about how he grew up, and he kind of deliberately plays a lot of things close to the vest,” Hamm says. But as he read about his friend’s upbringing, he was fascinated by how Michaels, the legend, began to take shape. “You start to see crumbs along the way of his life and his work.” Your Friends & Neighbors is the converse: viewers witness Coop’s life deconstructing.
When Hamm considers the television projects that preceded Your Friends & Neighbors—Fargo, The Morning Show, and Landman, a drama about the oil industry in which he plays a callous oil titan—he can point to two appealing commonalities: his characters felt new to him, and each show had a defined perspective. Landman, for instance, shines a light on the tension between Americans’ resentment of the ravages of the oil industry and our dependence on oil. “It’s not lost on these people that [oil] is in fact a finite resource,” he says. “It’s not lost on anybody that it is in some ways making the world harder and worse. It’s about: What do we do instead of it? And how can we do it in a way that is going to fulfill our needs? And I think that’s a fascinating point of view.”
"I did read the recaps. I was fascinated by hearing what people had to say. And I think that was a new way to consume television."
In Your Friends & Neighbors, Coop experiences a rapid and radical shift in his point of view. Having adjusted to a certain standard of living as a hedge fund manager, Coop is unceremoniously fired in the show’s first episode. He tells very few people about the reversal of his circumstances, but a severing has occurred all the same. Post-firing, he moves through his community as an outsider, disillusioned by his former friends’ superficiality. The things we own and the status we have, Coop finds, are ephemeral—viewers are reminded of this every time Coop’s fancy car’s accursed trunk pops open unbidden. “It does all feel like it could be very tenuous and, if you were a cynical person, very meaningless. So what does it really mean if it all could go away in a blink of an eye?” Hamm says. The question drives his character to begin stealing from his friends.
That Hamm is so thoughtful surprises me, largely because I have been binge-watching 30 Rock for the ninth time and have begun to conflate him with his character on the show, a love interest whose good looks render him profoundly out of touch. Hamm is quick to deepen a conversation, and to challenge his own ideas. As he describes the anti-materialism of Your Friends & Neighbors, he brings up the recent wildfires that devastated communities in Los Angeles. The fires were a lesson in how rapidly our circumstances can change, he says, but they were also proof that things, or the loss of things, can have tremendous weight. “There is some sort of meaning, obviously, to the things we acquire,” he says. “It’s just not necessarily the things that maybe we’re told are as meaningful as they seem to be. The value ascribed is not necessarily the value that an insurance company ascribed to them.”
It follows that Hamm is drawn to television that engages his whole brain—television you “absorb into your pores,” as he puts it. He does appreciate a passive viewing experience: he says he and his wife, actor Anna Osceola, often have Bobby Flay on while they’re cooking. (Though he has said nothing to disparage Flay, Hamm now launches into a firm defense of his oeuvre, from which, he says, he has learned a tremendous amount about cooking and restaurants.) But he is not particularly interested in acting in shows that are meant to be, or likely to be, passively viewed. These shows are becoming difficult to avoid, to the point that in 2023 Netflix executive Eunice Kim pledged to be more strategic about “second screen” viewing, acknowledging that viewers are often watching television while also on their phones. Hamm is a one-screen man.
He is acutely aware of shifts in how we watch television, chiefly because Mad Men rose alongside a trend whose ubiquity we now take for granted: recaps. Hamm remembers reading Basket of Kisses, a blog that recapped each Mad Men episode. He would sometimes lurk on the site, reading the comments. “That’s where all the theories were, and people would engage with it. I fortunately never got into that [posting]. I would start reading the comments and it would start to get a little dicey and I would go: This is not healthy; I know this is not healthy and there’s no good way to engage with this that’s going to be productive. But, that said, I did read the recaps. I was fascinated by hearing what people had to say. And I think that was a new way to consume television, where you could, if not in real-time, in a relatively small time offset, have your feelings validated.” He still, after watching something that he likes or dislikes, goes online to find out what other people think of it.
But mostly Hamm is suspicious of social media; he does not have any public social media, and he does not admit to any private accounts. “I was kind of grandfathered in, so I never had to really manage it,” he says. He notes that his wife, though at 36 is much younger than Hamm, feels the same way. He and Osceola have no drive to amass followers, and Hamm sees futility in building a presence on one platform when a new one will surely replace it in five years’ time. “We all know now what it really does, and what its true purpose is, which is to harvest and mine data on you and make it easier to sell whatever they want to sell you,” he says. “Everyone talks a big game about wanting their private lives to remain private, and yet every day people are opening all the doors to their homes and their lives. On purpose.”
He acknowledges that being a public figure has perhaps radicalized him against social media. After Mad Men, he spent thirty days in rehab: he went for many reasons, he says, “and they were my reasons, and they were not to be shared.” TMZ seized on the moment, printing a statement from Hamm’s team requesting privacy and sensitivity under the headline “Jon Hamm Completes Rehab Stint for Alcohol.” “There’s a reason Alcoholics Anonymous is meant to be anonymous, and there’s a reason HIPAA laws exist to protect people. But even so, that doesn’t account for the cravenness of people. And they know that there’s a market to sell that information,” Hamm says. A nasty Daily Mail post, he says, “is not enough to really change anybody's life in a material way, except in a momentary way, but it’s enough to affect the person you’re selling out, and that’s the real sad part of it.”
“Everyone talks a big game about wanting their private lives to remain private, and yet every day people are opening all the doors to their homes and their lives. On purpose.”
Often celebrities will add a caveat when they are describing the invasions of the press and social media: they are not complaining, they realize they are so privileged, and they are so grateful for their fans. Hamm does not, not because he doesn’t feel privileged or grateful, but because he’s stating a fact: being a celebrity today can be emotionally arduous. “There’s literally nobody safe. If you are close to that machine, you will get chewed up at some point.”
As he sees it, there are two ways to live with that truth. You can eschew social media, as he has, leaving yourself vulnerable to whatever people write about you, with no platform on which to defend yourself should they get something wrong. “Or you can play the game. You can take control of your own thing,” he says. “But for me, I didn’t choose to be a social media manager. Obviously most people don’t really do their own social media, but I don’t want to hire anybody to do my social media. I don't want to be responsible for the person whom I hired to do my social media when they write the wrong thing or use the wrong pronoun or say the wrong name.” Actors starting out now don’t always have that choice: to stand out from a vast crowd of breakout actors with huge followings, newcomers don’t just have to engage with social media; they have to bring something new or exceptional to it. I remark that Hamm was probably one of the last actors in the door before a complicated new era.
“It’s very true. We watched it all happen. The iPhone came out in 2007, and that was the second year of Mad Men. And by the end of that year all of us went from flip phones to iPhones,” he recalls. Then Twitter rose up, and then Instagram. “I was very attracted to it at a certain point, when it was nascent and burgeoning and manageable. But then by the second or third year of all those apps it was insane, and it was worldwide, and it was instantaneous, and that terrified me.”
Coop is not (fortunately) a mirror of Hamm. But the character and Hamm have both found themselves disillusioned by superficiality. One copes by stealing watches from his friends. The other copes by making television that you absorb into your pores.
GROOMING: Kim Verbeck
SET DESIGN: Abraham Latham
CREATIVE CONSULTANT: Mariana Suplicy
SET ASSISTANT: Jacob Pillot
STYLING ASSISTANT: Brittany Guereque
This is the L'OFFICIEL April 2025 Hommes issue cover story. Buy the April issue here.
