Forum Overview :: Mad Men :: screw you, MJ! screw you, farrah!

[quote name="up with pod people"]<a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/09/mad-men200909">the vanity fair front page article that never was</a> <img src="http://www.vanityfair.com/images/culture/2009/09/mad-men-0909-03.jpg"> [quote]...Obviously the other thing that made us go back to him again and again was this wonderful sadness and lost quality in his eyes. It’s a rare quality for someone who’s a strapping leading man.” That was something Weiner had picked up on right away. In his recollection he settled on Hamm the first time he saw him: “He was the only person I saw that I felt had this old-fashioned masculinity that reminded me a little of James Garner, or William Holden, or the other movie stars that I loved who were Boy Scouts.” There was something more: According to a recent profile of Hamm in GQ, after the actor read for Mad Men for the first time, <b>Weiner turned to the casting agent and declared, “That man was not raised by his parents.” Which was true:</b> Hamm’s mother had died when he was 10; he had been mostly raised by a grandmother and had a difficult relationship with his father, who himself died when Hamm was 20. Weiner’s observation was not only perceptive—and a little odd—but also relevant: Don’s backstory, which dribbled out across the first season, has him orphaned at a young age. (Hamm dryly told me that the parallel with his own childhood was “serendipitous.”)[/quote][/quote]