Interview

In retrospect, it seems strange that a television series like Mad Men—a period piece set in the early 1960s about guys who work in advertising—would become a cultural touchstone of the late-early ’00s. For one thing, Don Draper, the show’s murky protagonist—a seemingly prototypical Man in the Gray Flannel Suit played by Jon Hamm—is almost willfully difficult to know, much less like. He is probably one of the most complicated characters to appear on television in the last two decades, running neck-and-neck with Tony Soprano (whom Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner also had a hand in sculpting as a producer on The Sopranos). Draper is a man who is very clearly living in his moment, but as the coming revolutions of race, sex, culture, and Vietnam begin to wend their way into view, that moment seems destined to pass. As Don himself says near the end of the second season, “I’ve been watching my life. I keep scratching at it, trying to get into it.” So, too, has the audience, as Don has struggled to hold together the ever-unfurling existence that he has invented for himself and flashes of the man inside have been revealed in the mode of a painstakingly slow striptease . . .

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Fans of Mad Men are used to hearing Don employ romantic soliloquies like that to pitch clients on his ideas for how to sell things like cigarettes and coffee and slide-projector carousels. But here we might offer a different kind of pitch: That for all his furrowed brows and ponderous, smoky, what-does-it-all-mean glances, Don Draper is the red herring of Mad Men, and the show’s real action surrounds his wife, Betty, played with aplomb by January Jones. The preponderance of evidence is hard to overlook: While Don wears the idea of his own character as an allegory for the fallacies and facades of mid-century America as easily (and well) as he does his suits, Betty negotiates it all like she’s being slowly submerged in a bath of scalding hot water, constantly trying to hold back the screams. Even in his worst moments, Don somehow manages to keep up the old movie-star vibe and look stylishly askew. But real life, like Betty, is more often strange and messy. Her alabaster skin, icy blue eyes, and set-and-sprayed blond hair betray a sort of inner conflict that’s quietly escalated into a kindemotional mushroom cloud. She has ideas—about how people should act and how life should be—that are clearly not her own, and yet she’s always judging, judging, judging. But the main difference between Don and Betty is that she really believes in it all—her perfect-looking family, her suburban life, the overarching values of the world in which she lives—and the way she slowly breaks down as she watches everything get pulled apart, degraded, and even destroyed is what hints at the existence of some sort of living, beating heart at the core of the show. And then, in the moments when Betty snaps, like at the end of the first season, when she shoots her neighbor’s homing pigeon or gives themixed-up 9-year-old son of the neighborhood divorcée a lock of her hair, or during thesecond season, when she accuses Don of having an affair and wanders around the house in a cocktail dress for two days, or when she’s told by a man at a riding club to whom she’s attracted that she looks sad and responds, “My people are Nordic.” . . . Well, those are the reasons to watch Mad Men.

With the third season of Mad Men about to kick off this month on AMC, the 31-year-old Jones recently sat down in Los Angeles with none other than Jack Nicholson to discuss, among other things, what makes Betty Draper—and the actress who plays her—tick.