Interview with Jon Hamm: Making Million Dollar Arm Memories

*I attended this event as a guest of Disney/ABC/DisneyXD and any opinions are 100% my own.

“What was it like to meet Jon Hamm?!”

That is the question I  am getting asked most often, and it’s usually in the wide-eyed swooning voice of a woman.

“He’s on his way up and will be in the room in a few minutes.” 

The HE is Jon Hamm who plays JB Bernstein in Million Dollar Arm, and yes, Don Draper on Mad Men.

Interview with Jon Hamm

The first question was going to my bloggy friend sitting right next to me. Probably the biggest Mad Men fan I know and this moment she had been looking forward to for many weeks.

She had an amazing opening question for our interview with Jon Hamm, it was so awesome that she forgot it and remembered it within a minute thanks to all the excitement.

The door swings open, and in walks the tall, dark-haired, and handsome Jon Hamm. A genuine smile spread across his gorgeous face. He sat at the interview table and the questions began

The Mommers: “Were you filming Mad Men at the same time as Million Dollar Arm? If so, how hard was it for you to transition from the TV show to the movie, and did you have to fly back and forth?”

John Hamm: “We did not film concurrently. We wrapped season six and went basically right into the Indian portion of the movie, which we shot in Mumbai.

We wrapped I think in late April and then May, almost the whole month of May we were in India. I don’t think I could do that turnaround, I’m pretty good at keeping things separate, but that would’ve been rough.

A sixteen hour flight from Mumbai to Newark and then shooting here in L.A. would’ve been rough.”

As soon as he answered The Mommers quickly snuck her hand over and squeezed my knee. In that moment I could feel pure happiness ooze from her fingers and swell up into my heart.

Had we not been in front of Mr. Hamm I probably would have a let a tear of happiness fall for her. I wanted to tell you that, because….when you read this interview, and the others to come….each one was so inspirationally moving in different ways.

I may have been in LA, spending time with famous people, but really, I’m just a person like you. At home reading this in your living room. Those moments are life changing memories for me too. All right, all right…on with the interview!

Million Dollar Arm actually shot in India for portions of the film. Can you imagine that heat?! Jon Hamm talked about the heat, and the completely different culture he experienced during the making of the film.

Jon Hamm: “It’s not just the heat, it’s literally everything. It’s a completely different culture, and when you learn more about the actual J.B. Bernstein, he had to go through all this and figure out how to do business in this country.

Figure out how to manage all of this stuff and there was no guarantee that it was going to work, at all. It was a huge leap of faith. If you speak to him now he’s fairly conversant in Hindi and he’s been doing it for six or seven years now so he’s very much comfortable in Indian culture.

This was a direct result of this experience that he had.  So yeah. It was a full on, immersive experience. It was hot. So much so that even our Indian crew were like, “What do you do about this stuff?” “Well, we don’t shoot in May. You guys are idiots. The only ones who shoot in May are Americans. We go inside.””

Jon Hamm is a big baseball fan, St. Louis Cardinals are his team which makes sense considering his birthplace is St. Louis, Missouri! Gotta love the Midwest!

He was surprised that the Million Dollar Arm story had slipped his “fairly detailed baseball radar”  but he’s very glad he found out about the movie and played the role of JB Bernstein.

Jon Hamm: ” I met with Mark Ciardi and Gordon Gray who are the producers of the film. They produced The Rookie and Miracle so I was familiar with their work. I liked not only the kinds of movies that they made but, the kind of stuff that they’ve done with Disney.

It had a kind of sensibility that I sparked to. Then I read the script and I know Tommy McCarthy who wrote the script and I’ve been a big fan of his work as well. I was really impressed with the script and did not know it was a true story at the time.

It somehow escaped my fairly detailed baseball radar and I am a big baseball fan. I kind of Googled around and looked up some stuff and I learned about it. I thought well this could be, not only a fun project to work on as an actor, but just a fun…I mean we get to go to India and that could be an interesting experience too. I’m very, very glad I did. We’re tremendously proud of the film and I made some really good friends on it.”

With Jon Hamm recently being well-known as Don Draper on Mad Men, we were all curious to know what it was like to work on television compared to working on a feature film.

Jon Hamm: “It depends, you know, I would suggest that maybe doing a pilot for a TV show is very, very much similar to acting in a movie. Most of the things when you’re doing episodic television, you kind of know what works.

Especially a show like ours that’s been on six seasons. You’re comfortable with the character, you know what the audience likes, you know what the story’s going to be in some way, shape or form. A film you’re kind of creating out of whole cloth.

Obviously there’s a script there and it’s been developed and people have weighed in on it, and the studio’s got notes and everyone’s got notes and you make your decisions accordingly to try to tell that story as best you can. But, there’s no guarantee.

There’ve been tons of movies that we’ve all been excited to come out and you think, oh, this is gonna be great and it’s got my three favorite people in it and I love that director and the studio’s had nothing but hits. Then you watch it and you’re like, eh, it kind of didn’t work, did it?

You just don’t know. Sometimes the soufflé just falls. Generally making films is a much slower pace. Television you’re shooting seven, eight, nine pages a day, simply because you have to. Production schedule is that tight. Movies, not so much.

Although this one we, we really did. There were days when I had probably thirteen costume changes in one day. And I don’t wear a lot of crazy costumes in this movie. So it was like a different Polo and a different hat.  

We had so little time and we were kind of hamstrung by weather and light and location and all this other stuff that we really had to jam it all in. That’s service to Craig Gillespie, the director of the film, who was the Energizer Bunny and completely was our leader, and inspiring to work for. So props to him.”

With Million Dollar Arm being based on a true story, we wondered if he felt more pressure to portray that type of character.

Jon Hamm: There’s probably a little more pressure on Daniel Day Lewis playing Abraham Lincoln, although no one around really knows him anymore.

No, I felt very responsible towards, J.B. Bernstein, especially after having met him and kind of learning his story and learning how profoundly this experience changed his life. We tried to tell that in the film. 

The guy’s life was really changed for the better because of this experience. He did not set out to have some sort of life changing experience.

He just wanted to make money. Sometimes that happens. Unexpectedly you just all of a sudden find yourself affected by things and that’s J.B.’s story.  I felt very close to that and I didn’t wanna misrepresent him at all, certainly. He’s given me his stamp of approval.”

We asked Hamm about how traveling to India may have changed his life and I love what he had to say, about travel in general.

Jon Hamm: “I think all travel in general should be kind of life affirming and eye-opening in some way. This was certainly no exception. I’d never been to Asia, much less India specifically, so I had no concept of what I was going to see.

We’ve all seen photos of the Taj Mahal and the this and the that but it was like every travel experience. When you actually get there and you’re there in person, it’s in 3D and the sights and smells and the heat and everything else makes the experience even more worthwhile.

I can’t point to anything specifically where I had sort of epiphany about life, the universe and everything, but I did very much enjoy it. I would totally go back in a heartbeat. It’s such a big country with so many influences that I saw the tip, tip, tip of the iceberg of. So I’d love to go back.”