Why Jon Hamm owes his career to softcore porn: “Continuity is apparently an issue”
With a face straight out of a Greek myth and more charm in his little finger than most of us have in our whole bodies, Jon Hamm was designed to be a star.
On either screen, big or little, you can’t take your eyes off him, but even if they do look like they were carved from marble, nobody is actually born directly into the acting profession, and everyone has to start somewhere.
Technically, Hamm’s acting debut came at the age of one, when he played Winnie-the-Pooh in a school production (I couldn’t find any pictures of this, but believe me, I tried), and after his stint in the Hundred Acre Wood, he moved on to take the odd theatre gig here and there before finally committing to acting full-time in 1995. As anyone who knows anything about acting, it can be tough to get your foot in the door, so you have to take whatever job you can get, and for Hamm, this meant a trip to the seedy side of town.
In an interview with The Guardian, the man behind Don Draper revealed that he once had a job as a set dresser on a softcore porn film. “You gotta move cameras around, and ashtrays,” he said, “Continuity is apparently an issue”, as if that’s what people are focused on when watching porn.
Anyway, it was while he was working in this esteemed position that he got a phone call that would change his life. “I came in after another 12-hour day to this message on my answer phone,” he recalled. It was from Jennifer Westfeldt, a fellow actor, with whom he was friendly, calling to offer him a part in a play she was doing in New York.
“I was so exhausted and depressed and bone tired that I called her back immediately: ‘Yes! I don’t care what it is!’,” he continued, “I borrowed money for a ticket and lived in New York for six weeks on about $300, stayed on a friend’s coach, roller-bladed everywhere…”
The play was one that Westfeldt had co-written with her friend Heather Juergensen called Lipschtick, and tells the story of two women who, despondent at the thought of dating men, attempt to make a go of a same-sex relationship, which, in 2001, was turned into a film called Kissing Jessica Stein, one of the earliest queer films of its kind, where you can keep an eye out for a young Hamm making only his second movie appearance.
That fateful trip to New York not only set him on the road to superstardom, but it also had a profound impact on his personal life, wherein, after working together on the play, he and Westfeldt became an item in real life. Yes, the irony of a heterosexual couple getting together on the set of a lesbian play is not lost on me, but they continued working together and even formed their own production company in 2009.
Sadly, this romance wasn’t to last, and after 18 years together, Hamm and Westfeldt broke up in 2015, although she’s still a key part of his story, such that, without Westfeldt’s influence, he might still be on that porn set today.
