“You Know There’s No Actual Fucking”: Jon Hamm and Tina Fey Reunite

Jon Hamm will always be Don Draper—his price for TV immortality. But post–Mad Men, instead of chasing the impossible, he’s done it all—comedies, blockbusters, whatever needs a suave guy with a wink. Now, he’s back in prestige drama, leading Your Friends and Neighbors as a hedge-fund manager turned burglar. Tina Fey, who spotted his comedy game early, brings him to her NYC office to chat careers, aging, and the awkward art of sex scenes with friends.

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TUESDAY 12 PM FEBRUARY 18, 2025 NYC

TINA FEY: Hello, this is a test. I’ll sit really close to you because I have a shitty voice. Jon, how are you today?

JON HAMM: I’m great, Tina. Still coming down from the weekend.

FEY: This past weekend was SNL50. We’re speaking on Tuesday, which really feels like the morning after Sunday.

HAMM: It really does. I was saying to our dear friend Eric Gurian that the last time I hosted was 15 years ago.

FEY: Is that true?

HAMM: That is true. We were thinking back because that coincided with me meeting you, me doing 30 Rock, and Mad Men and 30 Rock’s kind of parallel journeys, which goes all the way back to Silvercup [Studios].

FEY: All the way back to Silvercup, where we were shooting 30 Rock when you guys shot the Mad Men pilot.

HAMM: We shot the pilot on a stage that The Sopranos used, because they were finishing. And then their whole crew came over and shot our pilot.

FEY: Incredible.

HAMM: And my driver was Jimmy Gandolfini’s driver, Patsy, because of course his name was Patsy.

FEY: We had our heroic runs at the same time. We were chronologically, I think, on the air one year ahead of you.

HAMM: Because it took us a year to get on the air.

FEY: It was the spring of 2005?

HAMM: That was it, because I turned 34 during that thing.

FEY: Are you born 1970 or 1971?

HAMM: 1971.

FEY: So I’m a minute older than you. Just remember that, everybody. I’m not as old as you think.

HAMM: David Spade is 60 this year.

FEY: I mean, I’m 54 and I watched him on TV when I was in high school, so yeah.

HAMM: I don’t understand it. He’s always 30 to me.

FEY: Alright, so I watched four episodes of Your Friends and Neighbors last night.

HAMM: Well, there’s the coincidence that you also worked with Jonathan Tropper.

FEY: Of course. I made a movie called This Is Where I Leave You that was based on a book that he wrote. There’s no book here, it’s straight to series.

HAMM: Right before the pandemic, I got an email from Jonathan out of nowhere. He said he wanted to sit down and talk about some stuff that he had written, these short stories. They were really good. Then we sat down and he said, “I have an idea for a show. It’s about this guy who lives in this incredibly wealthy community and falls on hard times. To make ends meet, he realizes that his neighbors have all this superficial extra stuff, and what if he just relieved them of some of that?” I said, “It sounds great.” And then the pandemic hit, and it was like, “Well, we’ll talk in five years.”

FEY: Wow, it was that long ago?

HAMM: Yeah. Four years went by in 25 minutes, and he had written a really cool pilot and set it up in a very compelling way. I was like, “This sounds like something that would be fun to do.” And Apple agreed.

FEY: I’m sure they leapt at the chance to work with you and Tropper. And it’s an excellent cast. Amanda Peet plays your ex-wife; Olivia Munn is one of the people in your community that you’re having an affair with.

HAMM: Yeah, the new money.

FEY: The vibe of the show almost reminded me of The Swimmer.

HAMM: I recently watched that again and it’s such a weird movie. Have you seen it in a minute?

FEY: I don’t know that I’ve seen it ever.

HAMM: [Laughs] It’s one of those movies that’s like, “Oh wow, the 1960s weren’t just counterculture weird. Even the normies were being really weird.” It exists in a place where Burt Lancaster is maybe having a psychic break.

FEY: Yeah. It’s based on a John Cheever short story, and it reminded me of your show in that it’s about a really well-off community where appearances matter, and in the story, the guy is just swimming from pool to pool. He jumps in a pool and then cuts through a yard and goes to the next pool, and you slowly start to realize he’s having a breakdown. That’s sort of the community that your new show takes place in, where everyone has everything and no one’s happy.

HAMM: There’s a lot of common threads with Mad Men, too, which was sort of pitching the idea of the perfect life and what does that look like.

FEY: You’ve done amazing work on Fargo and Landman, which is a huge hit, but how hard was it for you post–Mad Men to be like, “I’m going to agree to this thing for TV that I’m at the center of.” It’s easier to go and be a part of an existing franchise.

HAMM: Certainly. And none of it is easy, by the way. Even coming into Fargo, and Landman wasn’t established, but I definitely wasn’t at the center of that story.

FEY: It was more Billy Bob [Thornton]’s thing.

HAMM: And I knew that they were going to shoot me out in six weeks because that’s the time I had. And yeah, the weight is significantly less. It’s way harder to do at 53 than it was at 33.

FEY: One thing that you were saying to me too is that in Mad Men, it wasn’t always Don’s story. You’re the center of this series.

HAMM: I’m the center around which everything revolves. I don’t think I had a day off over the course of the whole summer, and commuting from New York to Upstate, it’s a lot.

FEY: Where did you shoot?

HAMM: Harrison, Rye, Tarrytown. We shot in your little neck of the woods, too.

FEY: In Beacon? Oh no, in Rockland County.

HAMM: Yeah. That little cute little town.

FEY: Piermont?

HAMM: Yes. It was super cute. It was really fun in the summertime to be in these leafy bedroom communities. Oh my god, I almost broke your dollhouse.

FEY: I have a dollhouse in my office, don’t worry about it.

HAMM: Nobody heard that. But it was a commitment, time-wise. I know Olivia [Munn] and John [Mulaney] lived up there full-time because they have little ones, so they didn’t want to do the commute, but we had our life down here, and the dog. But it was a challenge. And it was more of a challenge to regulate your energy. I don’t know if you’ve had this experience.

FEY: Yeah, you have to really go on battery reserve.

HAMM: And the weekends became really important. I had this great idea of like, we’ll go out and see shows, we’ll have a New York life. And it was like, no, I’m getting home at 8, maybe eating, and then going to sleep. And getting up at 6 in the morning and doing it again.

FEY: Yeah.

HAMM: Living the dream. Not complaining.

FEY: No, but it is being an athlete or something. And as Lorne [Michaels] always likes to say, it’s a visual medium.

HAMM: Yes, he does like to say that.

FEY: Let me see what else I want to ask you about. Do you want to talk more about the show? I like that you’re living here.

HAMM: I know, it’s fun. I mean, again, 15 years blows my mind because I had known you a little bit before—

FEY: I didn’t meet you before you hosted, and I remember calling or emailing Lorne and saying, “Let me know if he’s funny because we have a part coming up on 30 Rock that would be great for him.” And also to make sure you weren’t a dick.

HAMM: I mean, that’s a real thing. It’s not fun to work with people that aren’t fun.

FEY: That’s one where you’re just like, “I won’t do that anymore.” Life’s too short and the hours are too long.

HAMM: That was such a fun moment for me too, because I remember coming back down to the host dressing room at SNL, and the phone rang. I’m in 30 Rock and it’s like, whose phones are these? Does somebody have this number? Who’s calling my dressing room? So I picked up and I think it was Robert Carlock on the other end who said, “Hey, would you like to do this? We have a part for you. It’s a totally normal doctor that won’t go weird at all, I promise.”

FEY: So of course, the first episode you did with us, you were a normal doctor and it was about Liz just being like—

HAMM: You had a crush on me because you saw my mail.

FEY: And you bake. You were a normal human man.

HAMM: With a full responsibility of not only being a practicing physician, but having a child.

FEY: And by the end of this arc, you have hooks for hands.

HAMM: [Laughs] Yes.

FEY: And it turned out you were an incompetent doctor. We ruined you. Do you like playing drama or comedy more?

HAMM: I like the balance.

FEY: And there are moments of levity in Your Friends and Neighbors.

HAMM: For sure. And you go back and look at Mad Men, there’s jokes.

FEY: Because life is both. No good drama can be all seriousness, because no one lives that way.

HAMM: [Mad Men creator] Matt Weiner used to say, “I love writing people that laugh at their own jokes, because that’s what people do.” That’s the reason we make jokes, is to make each other laugh. So even if we go back to the show this weekend, it’s so fun to be goofy, but there’s also nothing better than making people feel something in a real way. That’s what I thought The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt did, too.

FEY: Thank you, we tried.

HAMM: Heavy jokes, and then at the end, you’re like, “I might be crying right now.” It’s a real journey. You, me, even [Kristen] Wiig, there’s a lot of funny people that also have depth to them and can make people sit or lean in and pay attention.

FEY: The thing that’s great about Your Friends and Neighbors is that your character starts on this journey of, “I’m going to steal a little bit from everyone around me who doesn’t appreciate what they have.” And it has that tension of how long can you pull this off. But in an ideal world, there’ll be a second, third, fourth, fifth season.

HAMM: Yeah. Obviously, we didn’t want this to turn into Breaking Bad where he becomes a super-criminal and is enmeshed in plot armor and nothing bad can happen to him because he’s always one step ahead of everybody. We wanted it to be dumb and messy because that’s what anybody that starts down this road is. They’re not good at it; they make mistakes. Like, how long is that sustainable? I don’t want to spoil anything, but by the end of the first season, the situation is resolved that we’ve set up in the opening of the pilot.

FEY: You’ve got a cliffhanger?

HAMM: It’s a serious cliffhanger.

FEY: Are you doing the second season for sure?

HAMM: They picked it up.

FEY: Amazing.

HAMM: Yeah, we’re starting in April. I hope people like it or it’s going to be a bummer to go to work every day.

FEY: I think people are going to like it. Do you get tired of fucking on camera at a certain point?

HAMM: You know there’s no actual fucking, Tina. You know that, right?

FEY: Of course, I know that. But still, those days are—

HAMM: It’s a bummer, man.

FEY: And it’s your friend’s wife [Olivia Munn, who’s married to John Mulaney].

HAMM: Yeah.

FEY: Is it worse or easier that it’s your friend’s wife?

HAMM: It’s a little bit easier because at least you know each other.

FEY: And no one is trying any funny business.

HAMM: And you’re like, “I’m not super self-conscious or self-denigrating. I don’t hate myself.”

FEY: Yeah, just do it.

HAMM: You just kind of have to do it. And again, try to have as much fun in an absurd situation that you can. I’m sure you’ve had your fair share of versions of that. I’m looking at you and Steve Carell. You guys have known each other for what—20, 30 years? It’s a similar thing. You’re like, “Okay, I guess we have to make out now.”

FEY: In The Four Seasons, I’m married to Will Forte, and I’ve never been more comfortable because it was just like, “Oh, thank god. It’s Forte; I don’t care how I look.”

HAMM: And he doesn’t either.

FEY: Yeah.

HAMM: There’s something about being as old as we are too that I’m comfy in how I look.

FEY: I think you should be. [Laughs]

HAMM: Well, no, I’m not trying to say that. I was so much more worried about that stuff in my twenties and thirties. Now I’m like, “Who gives a shit?” I’m not trying to win any kind of body-conscious race. That race is over, and Mark Wahlberg won.

FEY: With the help of Jesus.

HAMM: Jesus and his golf friends.

FEY: What else should we talk about? This is a funny question. Does Jon Hamm see himself as a leading man? A character actor?

HAMM: I think those categories are kind of a vestige of a different industry that we don’t really live in anymore. It’s like you’re a lead actor if you’re the guy that’s carrying most of the story, and at certain points, you’ll have character moments or whatever.

FEY: Yeah. I look at actors like Hugh Grant, especially, and I feel like now that he’s just old enough to be liberated from having to be anyone’s romantic lead, he’s doing such interesting stuff.

HAMM: Because it’s subverting the expectation, right? That’s the fun part of what we get to do, too. Even what you’ve enabled me to do with both 30 Rock and Kimmy.

FEY: Lorne, who is so insightful about talent, said the person that he thinks you’re like is James Garner.

HAMM: Matt Weiner said the same thing.

FEY: I hope you take it as a huge compliment.

HAMM: Absolutely.

FEY: What else do you want people to know about you?

HAMM: I think we’ve covered the bases, right? We’re friends, we’re affable, we worked together.

FEY: Yeah.

HAMM: That’s the most fun part about having a career this long, right? There is a breadth to your experience that is pretty great. And to know you as long as I have, and then Lorne and Wiig, and everybody that we all know in common, is nice. It means that you stuck around.

FEY: You showed up, you did a good job, you were affable.

HAMM: Yeah. And to your point of the no-assholes policy, it’s like, you’re not on that list. You keep getting calls, which is nice.

FEY: That’s all it is.

HAMM: Show up, do a good job, be nice to people.

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Grooming: Kim Verbeck using Oribe and 111skin at The Wall Group.

Photography Assistant: Jai Crocker.

Fashion Assistant: Natalie Ocampo.

Production Management: Cecilia Alvarez Blackwell.