Jon Hamm gushes over the creator of Saturday Night Live, Lorne Michaels, for giving them a chance to show his funny side.
He shared that the offer came to him after he was pitched several roles similar to his breakout character in Mad Men.
“I was offered a lot of roles that were a version of that character where you had been smoking a cigarette and sort of brooding, looking out a window into the dark city of some kind of place,” the 53-year-old told the reporters at the 2025 Hasty Pudding Man of the Year at Harvard in Cambridge.
“So I figured, I will do that for my day job,” he continued. “But I think there’s more stuff out [there] to do.”
But when Lorne offered the role for SNL, Jon recalled that it opened up new possibilities for his career, as he has hosted the show three times.
“I really credit none other than Lorne Michaels for offering me a [chance to] guest host Saturday Night Live [for the first time in 2008] to really get the sense of, well, I do have a funny side to me,” he said.
“Most of the people who knew me before they knew me for Mad Men knew that was the predominant side of me.”
“So Lorne gave me that opportunity, which led to 30 Rock, which led to Bridesmaids, which led to a lot of other gigs in the Tina Fey, Robert Carlock, Lorne Michaels universe,” Jon concluded. “So I’ll be forever grateful to [Michaels] for that.”
