kl7:

Hard Sell

Excerpts:

Unlike George Clooney, who started cute on The Facts of Life and manned up later, Jon Hamm has always looked older than he is. When Hamm drove from St. Louis to Los Angeles in 1995, with only $150 he had saved after a year of interning in the drama department of his old high school (like some superhandsome version of Welcome Back, Kotter where the teen boys hated him), he couldn’t get auditions. All the other 25-year-olds were playing teenagers on Dawson’s Creek–type shows. He lost his car when, after $1,600 in parking tickets, the city decided he’d be better off without it.

He met Westfeldt at a friend’s party, and she thought he was an arrogant prick. But when she needed to cast an unpaid part in her off-off-Broadway play, and that part was kind of arrogant pricky, she auditioned him over the phone. Hamm was working as a set dresser for a soft-core porn film. “A friend of mine from college—a girl—couldn’t take working on the creepazoid downtown toxic set anymore,” he says. “It seemed like a wonderful way to spend 12 hours a day five days a week for $150 a day…nonunion, no benefits, just a shitty job with a lot of boobs and sad people. Hollywood, baby! Suffice to say, when Jen called with an actual acting opportunity, my days as a set dresser—all told, about a month—were over.”

Hamm called a friend in New York and asked if he could sleep on his couch for six months. The play, which later turned into the 2001 movie Kissing Jessica Stein, started Hamm’s and Westfeldt’s relationship. Around the time they shot the movie, Hamm finally quit waiting tables, thanks to a recurring role on The Division and then Providence, which are both shows for women. He played a fireman and then a cop and, I’m assuming, acted sensitive and not at all Don Draper-y. When Providence ended, he kept getting close to landing TV jobs—seven network tests in which the part had been whittled down to a few actors—but other than a role in the movie We Were Soldiers, he was back to not working. “When you’re on a show and going to work every day, and then it is taken away, it gets hard,” he says.