Jon Hamm on How He Tapped Into ‘The Morning Show’ and ‘Fargo’ Roles Simultaneously and the Rise of the Elon Musk Character
While filming a heavy project, some view the ride home from work as a way to decompress. During production of “Fargo,” Jon Hamm used that one-hour commute in Calgary, Alberta for two things: ordering dinner and sleep.
“It was a time to figure out where to get food, because everything closes at 9 o’clock in Calgary. There’s one ramen place that’s open maybe till 9:30, so I can maybe get some food. Otherwise, I have to cook, and that’s going to be a real, real bummer,” says Hamm, who’s speaking to Variety while in the back of the car, commuting to yet another job.
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While working on “Fargo,” the FX series he leads as the toxic, abusive Roy Tillman, he was also juggling filming “The Morning Show,” playing the charming yet manipulative Paul Marks. On top of that, he was planning his wedding. After a long day on either set, he then sifted through emails “about wedding photographers and venue decisions,” he says. “The realities of life kind of came crashing in!”
To get into the darkness of the character while filming Noah Hawley’s drama, he lived alone in an Airbnb — “hotels get depressing after a couple weeks,” he says — and soaked in the environment.
“I was living there by myself in this lonely, little Airbnb, desperately trying to make sure that I would get on the Peloton every day to get my heart rate up and sweat and do something where I was feeling like I was engaged with real life,” he explains. “Once that hour-long drive to set started, it felt very isolated and very lonely, and that was a really great way into the headspace that I had to be in. It was super helpful. It’s one of those things that’s kind of accidental almost, or incidental maybe is the right word, but it’s certainly part of the job and you have to use what you can.”
Planning a wedding, however, helped him focus on more positive things than the horrors Roy was committing: “It was definitely a light at the end of the tunnel.”
Generally, he maintains a routine while on location, which is “the real glamour of working on location at this age,” he says: “Figure out when you’re going to work out and when you’re going to eat.”
Hamm loves to read and is “a big podcast guy,” usually listening to a “very dry history podcast” to fall asleep. “I find a local bookstore and I’ll buy a bunch of books, and then I’ll usually just leave them for the next person, because I also like discovering books.”
No matter the role, he says it’s about finding a way in and relating something about the character to his own life.
“With Roy, there’s some very obvious, of-the-moment resonance in the current political climate. So that wasn’t too difficult to kind of figure out,” he says, noting that the challenging part was to avoid elevating the drama and intensity without making Roy into a parody. “That’s kind of the beautiful alchemy in ‘Fargo.’ This world is so deeply depraved and dark, and yet there’s somehow humor in it.”
To create Paul Marks, he had long conversations with showrunner Charlotte Stoudt and Jennifer Aniston, who plays his love interest Alex Levy. For them, it all started with Alex and Paul’s relationship.
“How do these people begin a relationship as people over 50, very successful people? What does that look like when you’re intrigued and introduced to somebody who is at your level of competency and proficiency and doesn’t really want or need for anything more other than a connection?” they contemplated together.
From there, that was couched with the fact that Paul was a billionaire looking to take over Alex’s company. Although Paul literally bugs his girlfriend’s phone and tries to buy her company behind her back, Hamm tapped into him by looking at Paul’s goals as “almost pure.”
“It’s just that he wants two things that can exist in the same place. I was thinking about him like, what if he’s not a bad guy? He wants the girl, and he wants the gig; he wants both of the things. He wants to have his cake and eat it too, and therefore there’s probably going to be collateral damage,” Hamm says, before pointing out the truth. “I thought, that’s an interesting way into this person, who is not a great guy. You have to call it what it is: You can’t do that. You can’t want both of those things.”
It all came crashing down for Paul, when, in the finale, Alex found out that Paul was not only trying to buy UBA secretly, he was consistently lying to her and breaking the law. She flipped the script and hijacked his meeting with the board, exposing his illegal activity and ending their relationship.
“I think that that’s Paul’s come to Jesus: He doesn’t get what he wants, and I think that’s the real lesson that he is forced toward, which is a great piece of writing,” says Hamm. “He doesn’t win. He has to learn this very tough lesson.”
Despite all of that, Hamm believes that Paul was truly in love with Alex.
“I think that there was a real connection there. Had he allowed himself to understand that you can’t have both of those things occur at the same time, he would have found the deeper meaning of what that was, but he wouldn’t allow himself to do that,” says Hamm. “Maybe that’s a lesson that he comes back to and learns. It’s almost an epidemic thing with guys that age, with that kind of money and access. It’s like, well, I want everything, and I don’t want the hard stuff. I just want the easy stuff. That’s not how it works. [Bugging her phone]? That’s a bad move.”
Paul perfectly straddled the line between slimy and charming, many describing the character as Elon Musk-like; “Succession” and “A Murder at the End of the World” had their own Musk-like characters last year as well. It’s a popular theme right now — and Hamm has some ideas about why that is.
“They’re kind of buying their way into the conversation at this point, aren’t they? [Jeff] Bezos controls many online transactions in the world and bought the Washington Post, so he’s got a megaphone in some way. Elon Musk bought Twitter, renamed it and changed it, and now it’s a different entity. And so, he bought his megaphone in some way,” says Hamm.
“These guys, instead of being the kind of benevolent overlords that they used to be when there were steel barons and robber barons in the old days, and they would just build a giant building and call it Carnegie Hall, now they’re buying these massive legacy media corporations and using them as megaphones to get their opinions out in the world. And it’s an interesting choice,” he adds. “We used to have a little more stringent litigation against monopolizing things like that, but that seems to have gone the way of the dodo in many, many ways. We’re living in a very interesting inflection point, it seems, about where this massive amount of money concentrated in very few people is really having the effects that we were all afraid it was going to.”
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