Ten years after “Mad Men” wrapped, stars Jon Hamm and John Slattery still have fond memories of the landmark AMC drama. Well, perhaps except for the smoking. And the onion water.
Reuniting Saturday at Austin’s ATX TV Festival. Hamm and Slattery spoke to moderator Noah Hawley (who worked with Hamm on the most recent season of “Fargo”) about the legacy of the show, how it still resonates with both them and their fans — and yes, all those cigarettes.
That couldn’t have been good for you, Hawley said. Replied Hamm: “Oh, it was not. Yeah, I think somebody did a count, and in the pilot alone, I spoke 75 cigarettes… They are fake cigarettes, but that just means that there’s no nicotine in them. It doesn’t mean you’re not burning something.”
Because “Mad Men” was shot in Los Angeles but took place in New York, much of the filming was done indoors. “We didn’t go outside, which was awesome and not awesome,” Hamm said. “The whole thing, the whole stage is full of fake cigarette smoke.”
Slattery noted that the fake cigarettes meant that they were smoking rose petals and marshmallow. While that may sound nice, it wasn’t. Then, add to that what was used to replicate a vodka martini: A glass of water with onion in it.
“Oh, the breath was lovely,” quipped Hamm.
Slattery pointed out that the “vodka” was fake, but the onion was very real. “Pop another pearl onion in your glass of water, and then smoke 26 more fake cigarettes and it’s 9:30 in the morning!” he said.
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At least it was slightly better than smoking real cigarettes — something that Hamm said “some of the younger actors” tried to do while shooting the “Mad Men” pilot.
“They were like, ‘We’re gonna smoke real cigarettes. We really want to, feel it and do it,’ “ Hamm recalled. “And I was like, ‘let me know how that goes.’ And within three days, they were yellow and sallow. This is a terrible idea.”
Hawley pointed out that it’s similar to another trick that actors soon learn: Take very small bites when eating food on camera, since you’ll be doing it over and over again.
“And move [the food] around the plate,” Hamm added. “We can’t all be Brad Pitt. Would that we could!”
Cigarettes, of course, were an important part of setting the scene for what it was like to be an advertising exec on Madison Avenue in the early 1960s.
“I remember at some point, having a conversation with the executives at AMC,” Hamm said. “They said, ‘Do they have to smoke?’ That was like, Are you fucking kidding me? Yes, they literally have to. They’re addicted to cigarettes. It’s kind of why they’re sold. They’re super popular!”
During the panel, Hamm reminisced about how much “Mad Men” changed his life. “I started that when I was 35 years old. Went right through to the age of 45,” he said. “So it’s kind of a transitional moment in life and time. Our real lives happen, relationships started and ended, and people had babies, got married and got divorced, and all this shit happened in the real world. It almost seemed displaced from that in a lot, in a weird way, because so much of working on the show was stepping into a time capsule for real.
“If you guys could jump back in time and visit the set, it literally was picture perfect,” he added. “When you’re in gear and smoking cigarette and looking out the fake window, the fake hanging part of Midtown, it was believable. Obviously it’s a tremendous honor, and it’s a wonderful thing to have worked on and contribute to something that has lasted this long. I’m glad I’m still alive, basically because of the amount of cigarettes I smoked. But the amount of work we put into it feels commensurate with the amount of love we’re getting back, which is a nice feeling as well. So that’s pretty awesome. I mean, to be sitting here at this incredible festival talking about something you did a decade ago, and have this many people show up just to hear it is tremendous.”
Slattery had a similar reflection on his “Mad Men” experience. “It felt like a parallel life,” he said. “There were about six months a year we would do this, and then we would go away. For a couple of years there we were pretty sure we were going to do it again. And to be in the hands of those writers and those designers and those other actors, you had this incredibly intimate relationship with these people that was not your real life. But was just as real and just as demanding and complicated. Yeah, it was all fake, and we went home at the end of the day, but it was such a gift. I think, to pretty much a person, we clocked that right away.”
From Variety US