“Mad Men” star Jon Hamm calls playing Don Draper on the AMC drama his “best job” ever in the upcoming issue of Vanity Fair, and reflects on his worst: working on soft-core porn productions for Cinemax.
Don’t start searching through Cinemax (a.k.a. Skinemax) archives for a glimpse of Hamm in action, though. The actor was actually working behind the scenes as a set dresser, a gig he had when he turned to television to try — and fail — to find love on 1996 game show “The Big Date.”
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“I was actually at that time working as a set dresser for Cinemax soft-core-porn movies,” he says in the June issue hitting newsstands on Thursday. “It was soul-crushing.”
The struggle paid off, obviously. Hamm takes the lead on the big screen this summer in Disney’s sports drama, “Million Dollar Arm.”
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Even with 52 acting credits under his belt, the one that shot him to stardom — and earned him his first Golden Globe, plus 11 Emmy nominations — is still his favorite.
“This is the best job I’ve ever had and maybe ever will have in my life — it’s so fun to play all of this,” Hamm says. “It can be relentlessly dark. It can be terribly sexually inappropriate, is a way to say it. But who else gets a chance to do any of that stuff? There’s so much there.”