Jon Hamm (Fargo Week)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. Bonus episode. Fargo week. Fargo week, chapter two. Bonus episode, the one and only, the legendary, John Hamm.

Oh, my god, 30 Rock.

30 Rock, Parks and Rec, Kimmy Schmidt. Oh, that's fun. Yeah, The Morning Show, Curb Your Enthusiasm. Anyways, but we are here, of course, to talk to him a lot about Fargo, which we couldn't be more obsessed with. Very fun interview.

Very fun.

Very special.

So there's a scene, there's a scene in Fargo of John Hamm. Okay. And this song plays. Oh.

India.

Oh. Did Linnea teach you about that?

I don't know my friend's name, so I wouldn't bring it. ♪ Baby, can you see, I'm calling ♪.

♪ A guy like you should wear a warning ♪.

♪ It's dangerous, I'm falling. ♪ You don't remember this? Yes.

No, Britney Spears, classic Britney Spears, Toxic. ♪ Baby, give me, it's dangerous, I'm loving it ♪ Fuck.

It's a really cool version.

It's such a good version and paired with what's going on in that scene. Oh my God, I had full body chills.

Yes, the strings, the sitar.

Jon Hamm is exceptional in this.

I think it's the best work of his life. It's really incredible. Please enjoy Jon Hamm.

♪ He's an armchair experiment ♪.

♪ He's an armchair experiment ♪.

♪ He's an armchair experiment ♪.

Welcome. Thanks.

You have a coffee, would you like me to bring you a new one to have on standby? Because we have this great Ember mug, it'll keep you warm.

Not sponsored.

With the Ember? Hopefully. Let me fill one up for you. Okay, let's do that. Shits and giggies.

Why not?

And then Moni lives directly across the street. She's building the house across the street.

Who?

Me.

Oh, which street?

This one right here.

In the neighborhood of Laughlin Park. Okay.

So our other driveway exits at Laughlin Park.

When I was looking for my house, was looking in Laughlin Park and couldn't really find anything.

Yeah, they come by few and far between.

You wouldn't believe the story that ended up with her getting that one. So really quick, that one had like 15 bidders.

Yeah.

Then there was an auction. Then it went to a probate court. Then they were in, literally in like a LA city court. Whoa. At an auction for her to get that one and she won the auction.

It was really exciting.

Was it like literally raise your hand to bid auction? Yeah.

Tell them the secret weapon too.

I brought Kristen.

Everyone was intimidated because she was involved in that bidding and they got a sense like, oh, this bitch is going to go.

Well, they're like, oh yeah, she'll just keep going and going. She's a very rich woman.

This is amazing.

It is insane that I'm not a spokesperson with this company, because I'm obsessed with it and I end up coming up nonstop on the show. Because a lot of guests are genuinely like, why hasn't my coffee gotten cold? This is so lovely. And then I'm forced to explain.

Yeah, like I said, my therapist has one of those and I'm constantly like distracted by it. When you're like, anyway, you know, my mom and this and that, I'm like, what's in there? How?

How's that working?

How does that work? Is it too cold to ask so many questions?

Does it almost feel like he's texting because it's high tech? It's like he's distracted by a device because it's got batteries.

Is it a male therapist?

No, female. Oh, nice.

I wonder, do people gender up?

It's probably the same therapist that a hundred percent of all of your friends go to because she's right in the neighborhood. Okay. I see people I recognize coming and going all the time.

Oh, it's like an audition. Totally. Can you hear them inside doing the same role?

My mom died and I was, that's mine.

Okay, so she's not yelling at that part. I was going to yell at that part. Maybe I shouldn't yell at that point. No. Have you had that moment where you're in an audition or you're sitting in the lobby and you hear someone in there and they're virtually doing what all your decisions were, and you're like, fuck, I got to flip this.

Now I got to completely turn it around.

I got to go the opposite direction.

I'm doing it all in Spanish. I had that once for Step Brothers. Adam Scott and Riggle and me were all in the waiting room. The same, it was Will and Adam McKay. I guess McKay was there.

I too auditioned for that role. And I'll say it's among a handful of times where I didn't get something and then I was mad.

I haven't had very many of those, though, have you?

Where I didn't get it?

Where you didn't get it and you were like, damn. A bunch of times I've been like, it's probably not going to be that good a movie. And then it wasn't. That was one that was really good. I wish I was in it.

Yes. Again, so this is one of the cases where it's like Adam Scott got it. I didn't know Adam Scott all that well. I wasn't friends with him, yet. Now I think he's like the greatest.

Adam's one of the first people I met in LA. Oh, really? Yeah, ages ago. Because he's buddies with Rudd. They were in acting school together.

Yeah, so he got that and I was resentful. And then I saw it and I was like, oh yeah, he's done it much better than I could have. And he deserves it. The other one I'll bore you with is James McAvoy was already in Wanted, but then he fell out because of a scheduling thing. And then they started reading people.

Not a lot of people did.

No. And then, about four months later, I go and see Last King of Scotland. And I am having a transcendent experience watching this guy act, like I was with Ewan McGregor in Trainspotter. To the point where I tell my girlfriend, I gotta fucking write this guy's name down when the credits come up. I gotta see everything he's done.

I remember that movie coming out. I was seeing ads for it on the NFL or something. And I'm like, are we supposed to know who anybody in this other than Angelina Jolie is? It was pitched as like, this is the next thing. And this guy's amazing.

I was tracking it, of course, because it was like the thing that got away that I was convinced would catapult me. Can you imagine Ewan wanted? At the time I could, but now, no. Looking back, it seems preposterous.

I couldn't tell you what that movie's about.

All I know is bullets. Bullets can turn.

Bullets go sideways, yeah. You know what else had that set up? Maybe I'm wrong and maybe I'm misremembering this, but it was a movie from the 80s starring Gene Simmons from Kiss and maybe Mick Jagger.

I remember it too.

And there was some kind of thing where the bullets could turn around.

He also, maybe Gene Simmons, had little like spider robots.

Yeah, spider robots. What was that movie? If only we had a device that could tell us every single movie.

An unanticipated aspect of this that we could completely geek out on forever is probably we've seen all those same insane movies of the early 80s. For sure. Like Bronx Warriors.

100% because of Blockbuster and Early Cable.

On TV. Did you guys have On in St. Louis?

On TV, yeah, for sure. I don't know if we had it there, but I definitely had it somewhere.

And there was It.

It, the movie?

No, there was On TV, and then there was It, the competitor.

I'm old enough to remember Channel Z from here.

Oh, and how did that work?

That was like a set-top box with buttons, manual analog buttons that you pressed. Yes, yes, toggle switches. Yeah, and you could go to Channel Z, which was essentially somewhere between, like a public access and a HBO kind of double duty. From what I remember, again, I was probably 10 or 11 when I came out here and I was like, Channel Z?

Wait, how did you come out here at 10?

Yeah, that early?

My mother's baby sister, my aunt Sue, had moved out here in the retail world. She worked for a company called JW Robinson's, which was an old department store out here. So she lived, literally, three's company in Brentwood in a swinging singles apartment complex. And my mom, who was also single.

Oh, like one of the ones on San Vicente, those kind of sets?

Yeah, right in there, yeah. Where'd Rob go? Oh, he's fucking perving out over?

Yeah, not too, yeah, hello.

Where is he?

He's like up our ass with a rubber knot.

Not too far away from the Nicole Simpson house. But this would have been, because my mom was still alive, so I would have been like nine. It would have been like 1980..

Were you completely blown away and enamored with this setting?

I thought it was the coolest place I'd ever seen in my life. I remember they took me to Westwood. And there was a, I don't even, I think they still have this store somewhere, but a store called Fiorucci. And it was like a punk, neon, new wave clothing store. And I was like, whoa, I can't.

Everything was made of plastic and polymer.

And literally the neon glasses. Everybody was an extra in a Go-Go's video. I was just like, are you kidding me? This place exists, this is real. And then the warehouse was the other place that I thought was super cool.

Also clothing, but they were playing techno-y music and new wave.

And it was like in a movie. Sarah Jessica Parker would have worked there in square pegs or something.

Do we share a love for Valley Girl, Nick Cage?

100%. Baby doll. The movie kind of holds up.

What about that soundtrack? That to me was like the gateway to all my new wave love.

There's some deep little Easter egg in there. Oh, Katie Seagal from Married With Children is in that movie, but only her name. They go to some rock and roll club, like Boardners or somewhere. And it's like next Thursday, Katie Seagal. She's like a music act.

Oh, no kidding.

I remember seeing that recently. My wife had never seen that movie or something. And we watched it and I was like, go back. It was in passing, like quickly.

Obviously she was.

We had like a rock and roll past.

Oh, my God, that's so cool. She's the coolest. Have you met her in real life?

I've met her in passing with her husband. Maybe they're still married, I'm not sure. Kurt Sutter. Yep. When Sons of Anarchy was winning a lot of awards or going to award shows, that was around the same time.

Oh, she's about as cool as they come.

Totally tracks, because if she was doing that in the 80s, you're like, you're probably pretty cool.

Yes, but I guess, growing up, seeing her as Peg Bundy, it's such a archetype character cartoon to meet the real woman. And yeah, you get the sense she was like a new wave chick.

I never got married with children. I was always a bit of a eye roll for me because I was in the wrong era and age. And you kind of watch back and you're like, oh, they were kind of doing a thing that I just didn't get. They were taking a big swing and they were winking just as much. And those people were all amazing.

Since we were children, yeah. Crazy. Yeah, you're right. I think, because the narrative of that show at the time was being positioned as Fox is being overly provocative to make a name for itself as a network. So then you heard that before you saw it, and it tainted the well a bit.

The audience, ooh, you know, you're like. And then you go back and you go, it's kind of the same thing that all in the family was doing with the toilet flushing. It was just a different time.

A thousand percent. And they're in on every joke. Okay, I wanna just go back to, because this is one of the only times this has happened to me. And it remains one of the great curiosities of my life. So I met you by way of Kimmel, in real life.

Where was this, a party? We need deets.

I wanna say it was like at a football watching.

Yeah, I think it was at his house.

But it also could have been at one of these night before parties. Because I also remember hanging out with you and Polar and Tina. But the point is, is, when I introduced myself to you, you said, yeah, we've already met. We met at Kimmel's this other time. And I was like, that's truly not possible because I'm an enormous fan and I know for sure I'd remember meeting you.

I will say this about that. You're not the only person who has met me before Mad Men and did not know. It didn't compute that you met.

Even your story, though, was post Mad Men.

Okay, then that's on you.

It is on me, but I don't understand it. Have you had that experience yourself where you're like, well, there's no way I would have forgot? Oh, for sure. You have, okay.

I've definitely had that thing of, I've had full on deep conversations with people. And then come back and been like, oh my God, it's so nice to meet you. And they're like, we talked it out. Some of that can be chalked up to being drunk, but some of that isn't. A lot of it is more, and you must have a version of this, and maybe this is a representation of that.

I've never thought of this until you were just describing it. But I think the closest analogy for me is like playing slots at a casino. You might go through like 40 different machines. You'll never remember one of them. It's just like ding, ding, ding, ding.

Or a politician that's just going down the line. Hey, there you are, look at you. How about that? Hey, all right, good job. And you meet these people and you go, man, what a weird life.

Yeah, I'll chalk some of it up too as like deep insecurity. For sure. Fake it till you make it. This is all on my end. Act like it's normal for you.

I think too, if you experience all of it, there's not enough hours in the day, really. You would never make it past the door of a party. You just go like, too much, gotta go, peace out. There's a certain part of it that's very self-protecting. You have to put some kind of armor up so you can make your way through the party.

All you've got going for you is you're tall and handsome at this point.

Kind of it. And I somehow got a golden ticket to get into this party. And I knew that the gift bag would be awesome.

You were getting a new HTC cell phone. for sure. For sure.

And I remember somebody going, excuse me, to get through a crowd. And I went, oh sure, excuse me. They came up behind me and it was Harrison Ford. Oh my God. Saying excuse me.

You were a pinballer.

I was like, oh my God, I'm ruining Hollywood. Like, I'm so sorry.

Up and comer, Jim Hamm takes out three, let's get your name wrong in this story. Yeah, John Hamm with an H.

But yeah, part of that is just, it's bonkers. Like our life is bonkers. And I was just recently, or not so recently, last September, October, back home at my high school. And my high school has a crazy, weird pedigree. It's in a tiny high school in St.

You know that story? No, but- When she was in eighth grade, he was teaching her acting.

Her sister was in eighth grade. But yeah, she was 15 and she was awesome. I was like, wow, you're really good. You're super committed to this.

And your girlfriend while you were there also-.

Was an actor. Sarah Clark did 24 Forever and yada, yada, yada.

Heather Goldenhurst was there. Do you know Elizabeth Lame? No. By chance? I think she went to school with Ellie.

So she must have been there.

Oh, entirely possible. She might have gone to NYU or Princeton, or wherever Ellie went, though. Could have been college.

This is John Burroughs.

Also, John Burroughs. Sam Altman, who created OpenAI and ChatGPT.

Oh, my God. Wow.

This is all to say that we had a hundred year anniversary of this school. It was founded in 1923.. This was last year. And I went there and after the big celebration, which I co-hosted with Ellie, there were probably 2000 people there. And I probably took a selfie with every single one of them, to the point where I went to my good friend's house.

When you were at the Golden Globes, did you feel like I belong here? I'll be here one day on my own right?

Absolutely not. I knew that it would be great if that would happen, but I certainly had no sense of anything. that was inevitable. It was like, be cool one day to sit in that table. Not to mention win two of them and all the other attendant weirdness.

Yeah, you rediscover it. It's so compartmentalized and it's such a heightened experience that it just kind of lives in some bizarre space in your brain. Okay, I have done so much assuming about you over the years without any real reason. But from the second I met you, I felt like,

The first time or the second time?

Well, according to you, the second time. According to me, the first time. There's been so many things I've just kind of maybe projected onto you. But as I was learning about you as a human, your story leading up to all this, some of them were falling into place nicely. Like, oh, I think my hunch was a little bit correct.

There was one. Well, it depends on how you define formative.

I guess you're living with your mom just like I was. Like, my parents got divorced at three, yours at two. There's not a man in my house patting me on the back as I go to school or coming home from school and saying, oh, I didn't tell him while this guy pushed me.

Did your mom date, guys, while you were?

Horrendous. One was an ex-baseball player. The other was a 6'3 triathlete. They were all alpha. They were fucking abusive and terrible.

I mean, it is weird. And part of it is, there was just a funny sketch from that Jacob Elordi kid on SNL. He did a sketch where he was coming back to talk to an acting class. And they're like, so what do you do about auditions? And what's it like?

Oh, my God.

And he was right off the boat from Australia. He was super young and handsome. But he got it, whatever, good for him. And that was one of those crazy things. But so many times passing through other people's orbits, like you said, you kind of go, oh yeah, he probably should have gotten that part.

Yeah, it turns out he was kind of a once-in-a-generation.

And we all know the end of that story, which is sad and awful in its own way. But it was crazy, and going through all of that. And I got so close. The people that I lost out to, John Favreau got a job.

Which one?

Not Armageddon, the other one, Deep Impact. Deep Impact. And I still, to this day, look at him and go, you know, you beat me out for an acting role. And he's like, yeah, I know. And even with Mad Men, it took forever for them to give me the part.

Learning that today, I was wondering, do you think you benefited from the fact that you really didn't believe you had a shot? You're like, this is definitely gonna go to a known name. And do you think that ended up being helpful?

I can't say that it was a better experience or worse, other than I made it here somehow. So did you. Eventually, we got picked.

Yeah.

And thank God, because I knew it for a fact that I did not want to be a 40-year-old. At that point, I didn't want to be a 30-year-old. That was my cutoff. I was like, five years is enough time to figure out the marketplace. I don't want to be in my 30s, waiting tables, bartending, which I was doing up until I was 29, basically.

I got here in 95.

When has the market spoken?

Yes, when are you gonna accept reality as it is presenting itself to you? And I found that incredibly demoralizing and hard. It's an eternity, because, again, think about the fraction of your life. Five years might not sound like a lot now, but at 25, that's a fifth of your life that you've experienced being an abject failure. I dealt with that by being hammered all the time and trying to get approval from ladies as much as humanly possible.

Those are two tried and true, and they work so well.

Work for a while, they really work for a while.

Well, part of it, I think, too, was, and I tell this to any of the kids that come out because I'm sort of de facto, especially from my high school, but also from college. Anybody that comes out here, I generally get an email or something. Hey, can you talk to this kid or sit down with this guy or girl or whatever and tell him the ropes? I'm always like, there's no ropes. It's just like, come out and good luck.

I tell people, to buy a dependable car.

Yeah, get a car that works and get a job. Those two things. And this is all to say that, for me, bartending and working in restaurants, you're surrounded by fellow travelers. Everybody's kind of got an audition or a music gig or an improv show or something, and so you're at least surrounded by people that are trying to do it and who get it a little bit. Then there's always the older guy.

Did it nurture in you any bad, like? I can give you an example of this terrible quality I developed, which is. I was so jealous of everybody that was making it that I became like an uber critic of everyone. I was the worst guy. If you were hammered with me, you'd start talking about these people that ultimately I idolized.

because I'm so jealous. Obviously, all that comes from being jealous and fear of your own thing. That's why the booze is a part of it. You don't know what you want until you see someone else get it and then you go, I want that. And then, if you happen to get it, you're like, I didn't really want this at all.

Also a bad comp. Yes. Because, let's also acknowledge, Paul Rudd is a unicorn.

He is an eternally youthful human that hasn't aged in 40 years.

Yep.

And I came out here and looked like I was 35 when I was 23.

Right, right, right.

So I came out here and it was like, Dawson's Creek, they're like, you could play the dad.

I'm like, I'm 26 years old, what do you mean?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm auditioning next to Harry Hamlin. I'm like, what? Right.

How is this working? Yeah, it was really cool when you could buy beer at 18, but it got real uncool probably as soon as you got to Hollywood.

But then your look catches up to your age and somehow it works.

Well, you kind of grow into yourself in a way, too. That was really what it was. Like, I think I was a late bloomer more than I wanted to admit. Well, for sure.

When you talk about growing up and you're trying to define yourself against other people and you're not really focusing on defining yourself in regards to yourself.

Yeah, I want to be Nic Cage in Valley Girl.

For sure. I want to be Harrison Ford. I want to be Han Solo. I want to be Don Johnson in Miami Vice. Those are the ones that I wanted to do.

Oh, DJing, that's a good pick.

Come on, man. I can feel it coming in the air tonight.

Damn right, you can.

You neglect defining yourself in your own terms, and it takes a minute. And part of it is getting the shit kicked out of you. Going in and going, man, why didn't I get that part? Yeah, I can sit at the bar and say, ah, this guy did that, or this guy did that, but what really was it?

I know, I know. It's hard.

Did you do everything you could? Or were you as prepared as you could be? Were you funny in a way that was relatable, or were you just kind of blowing it off?

and you'd self-sabotage it? Or was this actor who you think you best resemble?

You're kind of doing an impression of.

Yes, a thousand percent.

And it takes a minute to go. like, I owe myself the freedom to go. I'm going to do this. If they don't like it, cool.

Okay, back to St. Louis, though. Did your mom have shitty boyfriends?

I don't think so. So my parents got divorced when I was two. My mom died when I was 10.. So I had a pretty limited kid version of what my mom's life was. She would go out.

Okay, I got you. Some corduroy.

Yeah, a lot of elbow patches.

Sure, sure.

Because my mom was a secretary. That's how she met my dad.

At the family trucking company?

No. My mom was a secretary at a radio station, KWK. And her boss was my dad's friend and ended up being my dad's best man at their wedding. So it was my dad's second wedding. His first wife died suddenly as well.

I imagine he's pretty young to have been a- Back then. A widow and then a divorcee.

So he was born in 33.

Really quick, I can't imagine anything as destabilizing as losing your mom.

Right, especially when they're divorced.

Right, so it's not like there's a- It's like a total erasing of your known existence. in addition to that. You then moved to another town to join grandma and dad, right?

It was still St. Louis. It was just another part of town.

But I'm talking a new school, right? For sure. New school at 10.. That could be its own traumatic-.

True, and not for nothing. I was moving from, people from St. Louis would know this, but there's a version of this in every town. So I was moving from the very white suburban part of town that my mom was living in to the very black urban part that my father's mother's house was in, because it used to be in a very fancy neighborhood.

Had white flight.

White flight in the 60s.

Kind of a Detroit-y first scenario.

For sure, in fact, looks so much, when I finally shot a movie in Detroit in 2020, I was like, oh my God, this could be my neighborhood.

Same, when I went to St. Louis, I was like, did I just drive eight hours and I'm somehow still in Detroit?

And super duper similar in their aspect of the kind of working class and the segregation and the crazy racism. So I went to basically an all-black school for fifth and sixth grade. How did that work? It was a gear shift, for sure. I remember going to my first dance, my fifth grade dance, and the music was all R&B and George Clinton.

And make sure that you hadn't been taken hostage.

And my friend goes, you talk to the police like that? And I go, like what? What do you mean? And again, two completely different perspectives on how life works. And at the time I was like, that's weird.

The guy was kind of being aggressive and shitty.

Can I tell you, that was kind of my breakthrough in accepting this notion of white privileges. Like, well, I grew up with a single mother and we were on welfare and there was violence and addiction. So how privileged am I? But then I think about 10 years as a raging addict. I interacted with cops all the time.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

Goddamn, let's go.

I'm like, are you kidding me? And I didn't think anything weird about it until before he was gonna turn into our neighborhood, he finished the drink and threw the glass out the window.

Sure, because littering back then wasn't even a thing.

You're contributing to the community. I literally had no concept of it. We got home fine, but then I look back on it and go like, what the fuck?

Yeah. Wow.

And then we rode it into Mad Men.

How were you doing in that environment? as far as like, what kind of kid, were you prior to going to John Burroughs? Because that's gotta be a much different experience than where you landed.

I look back at my life as essentially being an only child. And I remember in a pre-internet era, almost pre-video game era, I mean, I had an Atari, but not till. later in life. The way to entertain yourself was reading. So I had comic books, I had National Geographics, I had so much written word, and I would just read stories.

Same with my grandparents. The grandparents in the 70s loved National Geographic.

And Reader's Digest.

And 60 Minutes.

Yeah, it was bananas. You could grab a Reader's Digest, and you know, I'll find some fun story in this. That's what I did. It was fun. I played a ton of sports.

You did football, baseball, and swimming in high school?

Yeah, in high school. But before that, so I would come home, latchkey kid. My mom was around. I would go open the thing. My babysitter was an eighth grade boy.

Bye.

And I was like, okay. And it was just, maybe you had this, but like the roving group of kids. So, whatever season it was, was the sport you played. Right. So if it was fall, it was like football.

Did your legs freeze over? Did you play hockey at all?

No, I never played hockey. I'm a huge fan, but it was too expensive.

Yeah, rich kids played, because you needed ice time.

You needed all the stuff, all the gear, which I never had. We played frozen driveway hockey.

I lived on a lake, so I got to play on a lake for free. But yeah, all the gear, the CCMs and the Bowers, all this shit.

And you look at that stuff and you go, that was crazy expensive.

Yes, yes.

And my best friend was the oldest of four, well, two of my best friends were all brothers. There was gear everywhere, so you could kind of find something that sort of fit. You could work it out, but I just never learned how to skate. That's a big part of it. We all know how to run.

Were you feeling lonely and lost?

Yes, and yes.

Did you develop any OCD stuff at that time?

No, but I was in the gifted program, so I had a lot of intellectual things feeding me. And part of it was really just navigating, losing my mom.

Were you sharing any of that with your dad or friends? See, this is the thing I'm talking about being locked into the masculinity. Like, there was all this chaos happening in my house, but it felt so weak to bring that up.

There was just no avenue down which you could drive that. that was considered a thing. Therapy, what the hell was that? I literally was given a book the day my mom died that said what to do when a parent dies.

Great, 180 pages. from now, you're gonna be all fixed.

Sure, it was written with the best of intentions, but there was no connective follow. Like, nowadays, you'd be in therapy. This is how it works, and it doesn't mean your mom didn't love you. The abandonment is not a thing. You can talk it out and unravel that knot.

I'm sure. Well, think about this. How many kids think they're responsible for their parents' divorce? I have to imagine in some bizarre 10-year-old mind, there's moments you think somehow you have played a role in this.

I must have done something wrong. It's a funny thing. The lessons are myriad, but the real good lesson is that the world doesn't really care about you. It's not your fault. You know, I remember seeing Good Will Hunting, and when Matt Damon breaks down and Rowan Williams says, it's not your fault, it's not your fault, it's not your fault, it's not your fault.

By the way, when you saw that movie, did you find that that scene was hitting you in a kind of unexpected box?

Yeah, a mess. In the movie theater, at the Beverly Center, I was literally, like, heaving, sobbing, and the girl I was with was like, are you okay? And I was like, clearly not. We're gonna have to call this one early, because I'm gonna have to go home and think about stuff.

I'm gonna journal a little bit tonight, I think.

How did she die?

It's really funny. I just read a thing on the internet of a woman who was diagnosed with, she had colon cancer, is the short answer, and read this story of this 35,. my mom was 35 when she died, so she had it probably when she was in her early 30s. It was not discovered until it was way too late, because you don't get a colonoscopy until you're 40 or 50.. I got mine at 40, because I have history.

That's the first time, because one of my follow-up questions is, my uncle and cousin both, same thing, so I started getting colonoscopies at, like, 17.

Well, I'm glad I got mine at 40, because there was stuff in there that they then removed, and it was like, okay, good, and I get them every two years or three years. I don't know, the pandemic kind of flipped the script a little bit, but I'm due for one this year, I know that. We should go together. You know who goes together? Who?

That's great. It's hilarious. Well, we should form one, maybe like me, you, and Kimmel.

I'm down. The day before is the worst. The procedure's lovely. The during is amazing.

Yeah, Versed in bed.

The best 90 minutes of sleep you'll ever have.

Versed, followed by Propofol, let's go.

Propofol me, baby, and then you wake up, and you fart for three hours, and you're like, this is so fun.

Can I tell you, my mother joined me at one of my ones here in LA, because I needed someone to drive me. Yeah, same thing, I wake up, and the nurse rolls me on my side, she goes, you're gonna feel the need to fart, and I go, no, I don't have to fart, and, as I'm saying, I don't need to fart, a good 40 second, longest of my life, fart. My mother is just one sheet away, sitting on a bed waiting for me. I hear her start laughing uncontrollably, and then my farts start react, because now I'm laughing, and my mother urinated on the fucking bedsheets. What a mess.

You hit the whole, the trifecta.

Sorry, you read the story.

Yeah, I read back to the story.

Oh, the story, there was a story about a woman who, same thing, had aggressive colon cancer, and it metastasized, and she got exactly the thing that my mom, my mom got a big chunk of her colon removed, she had a colostomy, the whole thing, and by the time they caught it, though, it had gone to her liver, and her stomach, and everything, and the doctors were like, that's it.

Did she warn you?

No, I was a kid. I literally started seeing all of the adults in my life break down. That's scary. My grandfather, who is like a Navy man, veteran, greatest guy in the world, weeping, and I was like, well, this can't be good. This is probably bad, and then, at a certain point, they were like, you need to go in and say goodbye to your mom, and they pushed me into the room, and she looked like a skeleton, and it was clearly dying, and I was like, what, what do I do?

Yeah, what are you supposed to say?

She come up on the bed, and she hugged me, I mean, she probably weighed under 100 pounds, and lost all her hair, and everything, chemo, and everything, I was just like, I don't.

That's scary for a kid.

Terrifying, it's like, go say goodbye to your mom,

like, okay, bye, I'll see you tomorrow, oh, no, you won't, oh, that, goodbye.

They think you'll be sad, but really, you're just scared.

Scared, terrified, again, this is the 70s, man, or 80s. No one had the vocabulary to even talk about it. The idea of talking about it was like, what's that gonna do?

Yeah, the idea of even helping a child through it, they don't even know how to help themselves through it. yet. There's no tools, no in existence.

In retrospect, of course, you think, oh, man, I should've done this, or that, or really taken it in, but you don't. You're just a scared little kid, and you go, okay, bye. And then cry, or don't cry, did I not cry enough? I don't know.

Yeah.

All of it's difficult, all of it's challenging, especially when you don't have the vocabulary to even manage getting through it, much less understanding that if you don't deal with this stuff, it's gonna really pay dividends down the line.

I was gonna ask, did you have a period of time where you had convinced yourself you were over all that, and it wasn't affecting you?

What I did really well is bury that motherfucker. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And keep it moving. And that's what it was pretty much for me for the late 80s. into the 90s.

Well, the fucking five years of floundering and losing faith in everything.

So that was, I knew I was like, this is gonna be rough, but then keeping it moving, keep it moving, get the next thing.

It's almost the athlete thing. It's like if you played football, and you have this play through the pain, ignore that, let's go, deal with that later. Yeah. You're also pursuing things that reinforce that approach.

And there's no goal line for acting, right? It's like, I just need to get an audition. Okay, then the goalposts move. Well, I just need to get this, I just need to get that, I just need to get that.

I want a series, now. I need a movie. Now I'm on a movie, and now I need to direct it. Anything.

So, finally, when you kind of sit down, and you rest, which I did probably third year of Mad Men, you go, oh man, where am I? I've been running for so long, where am I? Then? you understand, it's a deeper thing. And that's when you start talking to people that have the vocabulary to manage that.

Do you have the same gratitude I have, where it's like, I'm so glad I was given the cash and prizes so that I could find out it was like an internal job that had nothing to do with the cash. Because if I had not ever been given them, I would have died believing those were still gonna fix it.

Of course. Then you go, oh, that's all dumb. Right. That's all super dumb.

I'm so mad, too. Like, wait a minute, the cab driver knew who I was, why hasn't that fixed anything? Right, right. This was my dream.

It's impossible to say it if you've never been through it.

I know, you can't bestow it onto friends.

No one can understand it without going through it. That's the gratitude part, right? You go, thank God, I checked that box and I had that experience, therefore, I know that it's ultimately meaningless. And just another thing. Do you have the thing?

Yeah, it's hard not to collect shiny things.

But I go through and I give it all away.

I do a lot of that. To know me is to have gotten many free shoes and pants and everything else.

Do you have friends that are your same shoe size? Because I don't.

Well, I have friends who have made themselves my same shoe size. Fair enough, yeah. That'll work. I have friends that used to be a 10, that are now a 12.. I had the kind of sad thought on your behalf because your father then dies when you're 20..

There's certainly a version of that, yes, where you go, man, wouldn't it be nice if? I wish I could show them, look what I did. I had a similar experience when I got married. I got married this summer, first time I've ever been married, and it was my only thing. Congratulations.

Took place at the last scene of Mad Men.

Where I met my wife. I did not know she would be my wife then, but I just remember being literally arrested by her presence and going, whoa. And then life happened over the course of nine years, and then we got married. So my sisters were there, my aunts were there, but my mom and dad weren't. I had this sort of vicarious thrill that my sisters and my aunts were kind of like really felling and feeling this whole thing.

Yeah. Could you feel the emptiness, though? Could you feel like as things were getting so incredibly good for you and you're winning Emmys and you're getting nominated and you're on the very best show that's maybe ever been on TV other than Sopranos, are you feeling like, where is that accompanying sensation? Did you have a hard time internalizing it, or were you able to?

I think it was hard. I know it was hard. Part of it is that there's no playbook. That is a crazy ride. And you're going, oh my God, I'm hosting SNL.

Someone turns the huge switch on on the wall.

And you can't drink from it. You're fighting it off in a lot of ways. So it takes a level of emotional maturity that I did not have. I think I might have now, because I'm much more aware of the ephemeralness of it.

Not that you need my validation, but the being in front of me right now feels very different than the being I'm at 10, 12 years ago. I would hope so. The constriction, maybe that I felt seems to be dissipated.

For sure.

Do you feel that in your body?

100%. Unraveled in the best possible way and comfortable.

Loose.

I had this experience even in front of the camera, when I'm doing my job. I'm like, good. Well, okay. I'm like, I'm fine. Whatever this is is gonna be good.

Right.

I was talking with Billy Crudup about that on morning show. And I was like, have you hit that wall yet? Cause it's a good wall. When you go, oh, right. I'm good at this.

Yes. I belong here. I don't have to fucking strangle hold this anymore.

I don't have to death grip this thing. Yeah.

It's so present in Roy Tillman. I have to say, I've seen you in a lot of things. I've loved you in a lot of things. This to me, I was like, oh God damn, John. I didn't know you could be this sensational.

It's a very different version that I think people haven't seen me do that.

I haven't. You're a great motherfucker.

Part of what I got to do every day was really make sure that I remembered that this guy loves being this guy. You know what I mean?

That's a good mantra.

Like such a fan of himself.

In a sea of alphas, he's on top.

Don Draper loved being Don Draper, but at the core of him, he was Dick Whitman, and so there was a real bifurcated life.

Imposter-y.

Imposter stuff. Roy is Roy, man, and he loves it.

Yeah, you're so right. When he gets to do a speech, it's like you can tell he's nearly jacking off while he's hearing himself talk.

If not, actually, yeah, it's jackulating. And part of it was working with that tremendous cast, and part of it was really what Noah Hawley has done with all five seasons of that show, and each one of them are tremendous, and each one of them are radically different, is really lean into the cinematic-ness that the Coen brothers were always able to find, not just in Fargo, in all their movies, and there's little Easter eggs all over that show that are not just from Fargo, but hints into the Coen-.

The Coen canon.

Yeah, and so it's fun to be able to play with that, too.

If Noah called me to be in that world, I would feel fucking lucky. I cannot believe I get to enter something I have loved for so long.

I got to meet Noah-.

How do you feel coming on the show?

It's tremendous. It's the same thing, exactly the same thing. I got to meet Noah, we were at the CAA holiday party, or one of the things, and it's a dog show. I mean, it's just a million people there. It's way too crowded.

Were you, like us, thunderstruck by his intelligence?

Pretty much. He's smart, and he's creative, and he's funny and interesting, and I thought that the first season outperformed even my expectations of it. I'm like, there's no way this is gonna be good.

And it was sensational.

And it was better than good. And then the second season is a completely different show and equally interesting and cool. And so when we got down to the fourth season with Rock and how they completely reinvented it, and then our season, I'm like, my God, he's using split screens and crossfades and all of these old Hollywood techniques that are so perfectly weird for this show. I thought it was really cool. And I was like, what a brave choice to lean into that and really think, okay, this is kind of an old-timey thing, but somehow it's gonna work.

I recommend this all the time, but if you can get your hands on the DVD of Miller's Crossing, Barry Sonnenfeld is on there as an extra explaining, photographing a movie, you do not need to go to school. He gives you a masterclass in cinematography.

Incredible guy, I've known him for a long time. Oh, you have? Yeah, he's a really cool guy, an amazing director of photography, but also a very good director, and he's taken all the things, he would say this, I'm not talking out of school, he started in porn.

Oh, wonderful.

As a young camera man.

He mastered the close-up, I'm sure.

He's got some stories, and you go, okay, well, there's only so much you can do when you're telling that story.

You guys must have bonded over that, because you were a set decorator in softcore porn.

Exactly, I remember. Oh, wow, we need to touch on that for a second.

We need to touch and caress that.

That was really when I was like, I don't think I can do this anymore.

Yeah, were you 29?

I was 27 or 28,. yeah. And I remember getting up at seven o'clock in the morning and walking down to the corner, and my friend who's in Silver Lake, who's like an electrician on those, and he goes, I'll drive you, because I didn't have a car. I didn't have a car. And I'm like, what am I doing with my life?

More silk flowing off of walls.

Yeah, I was literally like, if they're looking at where the ashtray is, I'm pretty sure you guys are doing something wrong. That's not on me. It's fine.

You taught before you came out here then. So that would be extra hard, if you left a job that I assume was fulfilling, and then you're doing that.

Well, here's what I knew, because they asked if I wanted to come back to teach again. And I was 24 years old, and I was like, I do, because I did really enjoy it. But I knew that I could see how this was gonna go. And I was like, I'm gonna come back for one more year, and then I'm gonna do that for one more year, 30 times in a row. And I'm gonna retire in St.

Yeah. And that was nice.

I could maybe go back and still do that. Yeah.

Well, back to the Noah Hawley thing. You start a pattern that I admire about you, which is you're coming off, Mad Men. Clearly, I didn't know that you had met Noah at the CA party, but you do a small thing on Legion. You've done this a lot. I imagine the stress post, Mad Men, had to be intense.

Not really.

It wasn't. You weren't afraid.

Part of it was. I said, okay, I did that, and that was great. And if I don't do anything else, I got that.

You had that attitude. That's healthy.

I really did.

I just wanna point out, a lot of people, as the lead of an incredibly successful show, would probably be unwilling to go do a three-episode arc on 30 Rock or a three-episode arc on Legion.

The way I looked at it was that it was all work, and I love my job, and I get to work with this crazy talented group of people, and then I'll do an uncredited part in Bridesmaids. Like, of course, I wanna work with Kristen Wiig and Maya and Paul Feig.

But to me, what it said is you were humble enough to enter into these worlds that you were interested in, in a way that was realistic. What was clear to me is you really liked comedy, and you had just done Mad Men, and it was like, you want to play now. But you were humble enough and realistic to go, yeah, and the way I'm gonna be able to do that initially is to go, do this arc here and prove I've got chops and go here. And I think a lot of people would have lacked that humility.

I definitely didn't wanna be like, now. I wanna do a Will Ferrell movie, and I wanna be Will Ferrell.

Two-hander with Will Ferrell. But a lot of dudes would have done that.

A hard pass. That's why I wanted to be in Step Brothers. I was like, this is the perfect role.

Post Mad Men?

It was during Mad Men.

During Mad Men.

I think. But even so, you go, what's gonna be fun? What am I gonna take away, and what am I gonna enjoy about this process? And that was doing the thing on Legion, which was a voiceover role. Because I had been doing voiceovers for some time, and Noah was like, would you consider doing this?

You do, Lucy in the Sky, is that next with him?

Which was a script that he wasn't attached to. And I'd read, and I was like, this is pretty good. It was meant to be Reese Witherspoon. And she fell out for various reasons. And then Noah came on and was like, I'm doing a page one rewrite.

So do you feel like you would have been able to be as good as you were in Fargo? I guess, did it help enormously that you and Noah already had a comfort level? There was none of that kind of first day feeling each other out stuff. You entered it with a preexisting relationship.

That was helpful. There's always that first day of school thing where you're just like, I'm doing everything wrong. Part of it was feeling comfortable, going like, oh, I'm free to fail, and you can tell me, do less of that, do more of this.

Because if I was taking that big of a swing, it'd be very helpful to me that the director who brought me in, I already knew they thought I was good. That insecurity wouldn't swell up of like, fuck,

I'm gonna get fired. Somebody's gonna see dailies and go, this isn't working. We need to cast somebody else.

Have you been fired?

Yeah.

Oh yeah, me too, from a table read. What did you get fired from?

Oh, table read firing. No, I've never had that, but boy, that's always been in the back of my mind.

Yeah, I didn't even think that was an option.

Oh, it, so is, and people don't get that, especially with three camera stuff, when you have to nail a joke.

That's when I got fired from. I did Will and Grace. They virtually begged me to come on, and I couldn't do it schedule-wise, and finally I'm like, yes, I love Sean Hayes. I'm coming to do it. I did table read, and then I got a call, like two days later, from my agent, and they were telling me all these really positive things, and all of a sudden it occurred to me, why are they calling me to be so positive?

That's not good news. I don't need the money. I wanna be liked.

My wife's rich. I don't need to do this.

I got fired from a pilot that they shot, and then they fired the female lead, who I was the love interest of, and they were like, but we're not firing you. We wanna keep you. I'm like, how? If you fire her, then I have no reason for being. Yeah, yeah, but we're gonna blah, blah, blah.

I told what show it was. What'd you get fired from?

Well, it ended up being called Related.

Related, okay.

Yeah, I think it was called Sisters. when I did it. It was about three sisters, and they fired Laura San Giacomo, who was the oldest.