An enigmatic aura was a key ingredient to what made Don Draper one of the most compelling TV characters of all time, but this might not have been possible had “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner not fought to cast a relatively unknown entity. Speaking in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter for its “Awards Chatter” podcast, current “Your Friends and Neighbors” star Jon Hamm reminisced about the casting process for the show and the lengths executives went through to prove he had what it took to be a leading man. Ultimately, Hamm shared it came down to Weiner communicating the need to embrace the actor’s anonymity as a feature, not a flaw.
“The whole point of this show is that nobody knows who this guy is,” Hamm said of what Weiner told executives. “You can’t put — for one of the better examples — Rob Lowe into this show. It would be weird. You would go, ‘Oh, it’s the Rob Lowe show. Like, okay, cool.’ So that actually worked to my benefit rather than against me.”
That being said, convincing the network to put Hamm as #1 on the call sheet still proved quite the trial. He ended up having to audition “six or seven” times before being flown out to New York for a final meeting with the executives at AMC.
“I think that there were some high-level discussions about, ‘Are we really going to make this kid that nobody knows the lead of our show? This is the first show on our network that’s ever existed,’” said Hamm of AMC’s concerns. “The conventional wisdom was, you hire somebody that has credits or a thing.”
Thankfully though, during the meeting in New York, Hamm was officially offered the part. Beyond the fact that no one really knew who he was, Hamm also used personal experience and history to build his understanding of the role. In particular, he was reminded of his father, who would’ve been a contemporary of Don and shared many similar qualities.
“There was a resting kind of melancholy that I think my dad had as well as Don had, which is a little bit like, you have all of this stuff,” he told THR. “You have all of this privilege. You have all of this access. Everything, it seems, is going your way. So why aren’t you happier? And I think that that’s part of what drove the show as well.”
Hamm can currently be seen on the Apple TV+ series “Your Friends and Neighbors,” co-starring Amanda Peet and Olivia Munn.
“Your Friends and Neighbors” streams on Apple TV+ with new episodes dropping Fridays.
