Hamm’s journey to stardom has not been without its share of challenges, marked by personal loss and perseverance. After losing both parents at an early age, he faced the daunting task of breaking into the entertainment industry. Setting a personal deadline to become a paid actor by age 30, Hamm managed to achieve this goal just in time. However, it was not until six years later that he landed the transformative role in “Mad Men” that would elevate his career.

Understanding Hamm’s story requires delving into the less glamorous aspects of his life, which are filled with heartache and setbacks. These struggles resonate with many, as they reflect universal experiences of overcoming personal adversity to achieve success.

Hamm’s life was profoundly affected at age 10 when his mother, Deborah, succumbed to colon cancer at just 35. The illness struck suddenly, with her initial stomach pain quickly escalating into a fatal condition over a single summer. Hamm recalls the last time he saw his mother, a moment clouded by confusion and an indelible impact. In an interview with Interview Magazine, he shared the poignant memory of visiting her in the hospital, unsure of the gravity of the situation.

At the age of 10, Jon Hamm experienced a life-changing tragedy after his mother, Deborah, died from colon cancer at the young age of 35. The event seemingly came out of nowhere, with his mother experiencing pain in her stomach one day before the disease spiraled and became fatal over the course of one summer. For Hamm, the last day he saw his mother alive was confusing and left an undeniable mark on him. He explained to Interview Magazine how he went to the hospital to see her and was told to bid her farewell, but he didn’t quite understand what was happening at the time.

“And my mom, by that point, was a skeleton,” Hamm said. “And it was terrifying. But my mom just said, ‘Get up here on the bed.’ She didn’t look like my mom, but [she] smelled like my mom. I knew it was my mom. I climbed on the bed. And that was the last time I saw her.”

In a separate interview for “Next Question with Katie Couric,” Hamm shared how the aftermath was a difficult period for him, his two half sisters, and father, Daniel. The actor especially expressed sympathy for his father, who suffered this loss at a different time when mental health was more of a taboo subject than today. “His first wife passed away very suddenly as well,” Hamm said. “He had no vocabulary, no infrastructure to help, and no mental health checks. None of that.”

Around a decade after his mother’s passing, another tragedy befell Jon Hamm. While he was enrolled at the University of Texas, his father died after a period of illness. “I was sitting somewhere and it all just landed on me,” Hamm told The Times. “I was like, I’ve been on this planet for two decades and I have no parents. I never really got a chance to have an adult conversation with them … And that’s a drag.”

After his father’s death, Hamm decided to come home for a while to find some stability and order in his life. As he told Stylist, he did this by transferring to the University of Missouri, working at a restaurant, and living with his eldest sister from his father’s first marriage. He also found support from his friends’ parents, referring to them as “surrogate parents” (three of whom he still stays in touch with). In fact, Hamm disclosed that the parents of one specific friend let him stay in their home for 12 months after he left college and had no place to stay.

Even though he lost his father at 20, Hamm revealed that the unshakable memories of his dad helped to shape the characterization of his most famous role. So, whenever you see Don Draper’s best and worst moments in “Mad Men,” remember that the actor based aspects of his Emmy Award-winning performance on his dad, who had been a businessman in the ’60s.

While Jon Hamm has been open about the many people who helped him get back on his feet after his parents’ death, he still dealt with mental health issues, especially after his father’s passing. “I struggled with chronic depression,” he told The Guardian. “I was in bad shape. I knew I had to get back in school and back in some kind of structured environment and… continue.”

Appearing on “In Depth with Graham Bensinger,” Hamm said that his sister was the first person who told him he needed help and encouraged him to seek professional assistance. However, he rejected this notion at first, preferring to internalize his emotions and refusing to discuss his feelings when friends checked up on him.

After Hamm’s sister pointed out that he was “sleeping until four o’clock in the afternoon,” he heeded her recommendation and attended therapy to address his chronic depression. “Seeing the therapist at that time was profoundly helpful, because [therapy] does what it does; it gives you another perspective on something that you can’t quite figure out,” he told Bensinger. “[The therapist] put me on medication that changed my brain chemistry enough to where, okay, I’m feeling a little better. I can get up and go to work. I can get up and go to school. I can self-motivate again.”

It’s easier to catch a cold than a break in Hollywood. It’s a highly competitive scene, and there’s a reason that Los Angeles is sometimes referred to as the city of broken dreams, since many people go there with all kinds of aspirations and leave with nothing but a bruised ego and emotional baggage. That didn’t deter Jon Hamm, though. In 1995, at the age of 24, he chased his dreams of becoming an actor and left his hometown of St. Louis for LA.

He seemed to be on the fast track to superstardom too, signing with the esteemed William Morris Agency (WMA) and getting into the right rooms for big auditions. “I had met Steven Spielberg and all these people that had my eyes just rolling back in my head,” Hamm told The Guardian in the aforementioned interview. “The opportunities I almost had!” By his own admission, though, Hamm fumbled many readings by being too inside his own head. “I would get hung up on that stuff and be an utter failure in the room,” he said.

Unfortunately, this resulted in WMA dropping him as a client after three years of limited success. While it stung at the time, Hamm decided to persevere and find other representation. He received roles here and there, but it would be a while before he became a household name. As a matter of fact, Jon Hamm wasn’t even supposed to star in the series that launched his career, “Mad Men.”

The early years in Los Angeles were rough on Jon Hamm. He waited tables and worked as a set dresser in the adult film industry, while he continued to go to auditions and hoped for his big break to arrive and change his fortunes. Hamm featured on an episode of the ’90s dating show “The Big Date,” but that appearance did very little to boost his profile in the world of showbiz (though it’s a wonderful time capsule to look back on now).

“There were a couple of years when I was living on $5,000 a year,” Hamm revealed to People. “With that kind of poverty, you’re not buying food, you’re eating Ramen noodles and living off your roommates’ largesse. It was hard.”

As the bit parts came in, it eased some of the financial pressure on him, but Hamm still struggled to make ends meet. When his car broke down and he didn’t have enough money to fix it, he began to catch the bus to get around town. In terms of his rent, Hamm managed to delay payments by using his charm on his landlord. It was touch and go for a while, as the actor started to make ulterior plans for a life that didn’t involve acting.

Any life coach will stress the importance of setting goals, especially when it comes to sticking to deadlines. If you keep ignoring these important dates and milestones, you might end up chasing dreams that’ll never come to fruition. Even if you don’t like life coaches, it’s sage advice. Jon Hamm understood that becoming an actor wasn’t going to be easy, so when he moved to Los Angeles in his mid 20s, he set a hard deadline for his acting career to take off. He told himself that if he didn’t achieve his goals by the deadline, he planned to go back to teaching, which he had done before he headed off to Tinsel Town.

As he told W Magazine, he wanted to get to the stage in which he was “self-sufficient as an actor,” and he didn’t want to be 40 and still waiting tables. He cut it very close, though. “I gave myself to my 30th birthday, and my 30th birthday actually happened on the set of ‘We Were Soldiers,’ which was my first big Hollywood movie — a Mel Gibson vehicle,” Hamm said. “I was making enough money to quit my waiting job.”

From that point on, his career took off. Jon Hamm played a character in “CSI: Miami” and started to rack up the credits on TV shows, appearing in “The Division,” “The Unit,” and “What About Brian?” However, it would take until he turned 36 for Hamm’s profile to get to the next level.

Even though Jon Hamm’s Hollywood breakthrough nearly happened years before “Mad Men,” it’s no exaggeration to say the role of Don Draper changed his life. The show gobbled up award after award, while Hamm received universal praise for his performance as the complex advertising executive who had more than a few skeletons in his closet. However, you know what they say about the price of fame.

While a leading role on an acclaimed TV show is everything that Hamm could have wished for as he clawed and fought for a place in Hollywood, he experienced the weight of expectations and the pressure of headlining his own series. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2010, he discussed a condition he developed due to the demanding rigors of his job as Don Draper. “I have vitiligo,” he said. “It’s stress-oriented. It comes and goes and waxes and wanes. This did not exist before the show.”

Vitiligo is a medical condition that causes people to lose color or pigmentation on their skin. In a separate interview with Lee Thomas, Hamm revealed that he noticed a spot on his neck after he shot the pilot for “Mad Men.” At first, he thought it was a result of shaving, but then he noticed the spots developing on his hands and feet.

In 2015, the final season of “Mad Men” wrapped after having been split into two parts the previous year. Before the press cycle for its last hurrah kicked off, a statement was issued by Jon Hamm’s publicist confirming that the actor had completed a stint at a rehabilitation facility for the treatment of alcoholism, requesting privacy about this specific event.

In the subsequent press tour, Hamm didn’t publicly discuss his rehab stay apart from thanking people for their support, including his then-partner Jennifer Westfeldt, instead focusing on Don Draper’s last ride and the ending of “Mad Men.” However, in 2016, the actor spoke about the importance of seeking treatment rather than the private reasons he did so.

“It has all these connotations, but it’s just an extended period of talking about yourself,” Hamm told Mr. Porter. “People go for all sorts of reasons, not all of which are chemically related. But there’s something to be said for pulling yourself out of the grind for a period of time and concentrating on recalibrating the system. And it works. It’s great.”

Don Draper isn’t only one of the most complicated characters in “Mad Men,” but also TV history as a whole. Despite the natural charisma and affable qualities that have the audience rooting for him, he still does a lot of shady things on the show, venturing down the dark side way too often. Of course, he’s a three-dimensional character, carrying the propensity for good and bad that every human being is capable of, but it’s a heavy part that can weigh an actor down.

For Jon Hamm, it was bittersweet to tell Don, “So long, and thanks for the fish.” In an interview with GQ, he explained how it was Bryan Cranston who told him how difficult it would be to leave the character behind (which Cranston had just done with Walter White from “Breaking Bad,” on the same network as “Mad Men”), and he had felt it. Hamm likened filming the last season of “Mad Men” to the final year of high school where everyone knows it’s coming to an end and promises to stay in touch, but he questioned if it really happens.

“It’s a confusing juxtaposition,” his then-partner Jennifer Westfeldt also told GQ. “I think the darkness of Don has weighed heavily on Jon, despite it being the role of a lifetime and the opportunity that gave him the career of his dreams. The end was of course bittersweet and complicated for Jonny.”

On Jon Hamm’s journey to superstardom, there was one constant along the way: Jennifer Westfeldt. Hamm has never shied away from praising Westfeldt, who’s also an actor and filmmaker, for being supportive and encouraging as he made his way through the business. They were together for 18 years as a couple, through the ups and the downs, but they never walked down the aisle.

In 2015, the news broke that the pair had decided to call it quits. “With great sadness, we have decided to separate, after 18 years of love and shared history,” they announced in a joint statement to People. “We will continue to be supportive of each other in every way possible moving forward.”

In a 2017 interview with InStyle, Hamm spoke briefly about the split and his emotional state, saying, “It’s hard. It’s hard to be single after being together for a long time. It’s really hard. It sucks.” Even though happily ever after wasn’t on the cards for Hamm and Westfeldt as a couple, Hamm found love again. He started dating “Mad Men” co-star Anna Osceola in 2020, and they were married in 2023.

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