Jon Hamm Talks About the ‘Mad Men’ Series Finale

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Jon Hamm in the series finale of “Mad Men.” Michael Yarish/AMC
Spoilers for the series finale of “Mad Men” follow. 
He has been Don Draper, the singularly suave advertising executive of the 1960s (and early 1970s), whose cool and in-control exterior hid an insecure man unsure of his place in a rapidly changing world. And he has been Dick Whitman, the son of a prostitute mother and an alcoholic father, who saw a chance to create a new life for himself by stealing the identity of another man he accidentally killed in the Korean War.
Now, Jon Hamm is neither of these characters. On Sunday night, his eight-year, seven-season journey on the AMC period drama “Mad Men” came to an end, along with the series itself. The instantly provocative last minutes of the show’s concluding episode, “Person to Person,” found Draper (or was he Whitman?) at the end of a cross-country trek, at an Esalen-like retreat in California, experiencing what looked like some sort of moment of transcendence as a smile unfurled above his lantern-like jaw. With a final ding, the screen cut to the 1971 Coca-Cola “Hilltop” commercial — a sign that, depending on how you read it, either Draper had found the enlightenment this famous ad was trying to commodify, or was responsible for creating the ad himself. 
Freed from the dual responsibilities of Draper and Whitman, Mr. Hamm spoke on Monday evening about the end of “Mad Men,” and what that last sequence meant to him. These are edited excerpts from that conversation. 
Q.
Those last few moments of the episode, and that transition from Draper’s bliss to the Coke commercial, has raised many questions about what it means. Is there a correct answer to that question?
A.
I think there probably is. But I think, like most stories that we go back to, that it’s a little bit ambiguous. We had talked about this ending for a long time and that was Matt [Weiner, the “Mad Men” creator and show runner]’s image. I was struck by the poetry of it. I didn’t know what his plans were, to get Don to this meditative, contemplative place. I just knew that he had this final image in mind. 
Q.
Do you have an interpretation of it?
A.
I do. When we find Don in that place, and this stranger relates this story of not being heard or seen or understood or appreciated, the resonance for Don was total in that moment. There was a void staring at him. We see him in an incredibly vulnerable place, surrounded by strangers, and he reaches out to the only person he can at that moment, and it’s this stranger. 
My take is that, the next day, he wakes up in this beautiful place, and has this serene moment of understanding, and realizes who he is. And who he is, is an advertising man. And so, this thing comes to him. There’s a way to see it in a completely cynical way, and say, “Wow, that’s awful.” But I think that for Don, it represents some kind of understanding and comfort in this incredibly unquiet, uncomfortable life that he has led. There was a little bit of a crumb dropped earlier in the season when Ted says there are three women in every man’s life, and Don says, “You’ve been sitting on that for a while, huh?” There are, not coincidentally, three person to person phone calls that Don makes in this episode, to three women who are important to him for different reasons. You see the slow degeneration of his relationships with those women over the course of those phone calls. 
Q.
Was it odd to be shooting these scenes away from your co-stars January Jones, Kiernan Shipka and Elisabeth Moss, and disconnected from the cast members you’d worked with for so long?
A.
Don’s journey over the last few episodes was a tricky experience, as an actor. To be set adrift for the last few weeks, really experiencing that aloneness, that self-exile that Don was experiencing, it was very disorienting, which hopefully played. It was thematically kind of perfect. The world carries on, and that’s a big question about Don. Did the place fall apart without me? Well, no. That’s not how it works. Everybody picks up and thinks, oh, that’s too bad — that guy had a nervous breakdown.
[With January Jones and Kiernan Shipka], we shot those on set. So you can actually have the person sitting right off camera, reading the lines to you. [For Elisabeth Moss], we were three and a half hours up the [California] coast, on the edge of a cliff. When he hangs up with Peggy, that was an incredibly difficult scene to shoot. We were in the middle of nowhere, and they were going to just have someone else read the lines, off-screen, for me. Elisabeth wasn’t there, but both Elisabeth and I suggested that it might be better if we could have an actual connection on the phone. So she was on the other end of the phone. I’m sure there are other takes of that scene where I’m much more emotional, and Matthew chose to use the ones that are a little more confused and restrained. He’s completely bereft, and because of that, he is then open to hearing this information and this story from this stranger. 
Q.
Did you know what was fated for all the other characters, too?
A.
Yes, I had been at a big table read last summer, so we all knew the story. I liked the misdirection of Joan striking off on her own and inviting Peggy to come along and Peggy having the confidence to say, “That’s what you want to do, not what I want to do.” Selfishly, I think if she took anything away from being mentored by my character, it was that — her confidence in her ability to say, “There’s something better out there for me, and I’m going to stick it out here and try to find it.” The romantic stuff with Stan is nice and warm and fuzzy, but to me, Peggy’s larger resolution was in the penultimate episode when she walks into McCann, the cock of the walk, and takes what’s hers. And it was pleasant to see Joan recalibrate from that and say, I’m doing this anyway. I don’t need a savior-man to come in and do a bunch of coke and live in paradise. I’m going to work, because I’m good at this. 
Q.
Have you had any opportunity to digest other people’s reactions to the finale?
A.
There’s people saying, oh, it’s so pat, and it’s rom-com-y, or whatever it is. But it’s not the end of anything. The world doesn’t blow up right after the Coke commercial ends. No one is suggesting that Stan and Peggy live happily ever after, or that Joan’s business is a rousing success, or that Roger and Marie come back from Paris together. None of it is done. Matt had said at one point, “I just want my characters to be a little more happy than they were in the beginning,” and I think that’s pretty much true. But these aren’t the last moments of any of these characters’ lives, including Betty. She doesn’t have much time left, but damn if she’s not going to spend it the way she wants to spend it.
I had to leave right after the screening last night, from L.A., and fly back to Atlanta on the red-eye. I had two of the nicest flight attendants in the world, who said, “Why are you here?” I said, “What? I’m going to Atlanta.” And they said, “But why? You should be there.” I said, “That’s very nice.” I’m still a little stunned, really, by it all. 
Q.
You said on Sunday, at a Television Academy event, that after “Mad Men” and after Don Draper, you will “fade into nothingness and no one will remember me.” Do you really think that?
A.
[chuckles knowingly] I think every actor thinks that when they end a job. You only hope that something else comes along. Do I think I will fade into obscurity? Hopefully not yet. But probably at some point, I will. Because that’s the nature of all things flesh. That’s how it works. It’s a hell of a thing, to end something like this. Is my melancholy seeping through enough? [laughs] In a much more healthy sense, we all put this show to bed quite some time ago, and said our goodbyes and cried our tears. Everybody’s moved on. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone else’s next things. As I said to someone, I’ll see you on “The Love Boat.” And if you print that, somebody, somewhere, is going to pitch that. 

A version of this article appears in print on 05/20/2015, on page C3 of the NewYork edition with the headline: ‘Mad Men’ Is Gone, but Its Characters Live On.