The Morning Show is one of the most—or maybe, currently, the most—unique viewing experiences on television. The Apple TV+ series about high-stakes drama among the execs, talents and grunts behind the scenes at a Big 4 network-type station is a melting pot of tones—if you’re not bracing yourself, you can get whiplash five times in any given episode. One second, a character is working through the messy affair she’s having by talking to her own AI avatar, then a former athlete-turned-anchor gets wrapped up in a decades-old cheating scandal, and in the next Jennifer Aniston and Jeremy Irons are having a knockdown dragout father-daughter fight.
There are two constants you can count on, though: An endless parade of A-list guest stars, and arcs that are sometimes literally ripped from the headlines. Jon Hamm is a perfect product of that venn diagram. Hamm first showed up during season 3 as Paul Marks, a tech oligarch and romantic foil to Jennifer Aniston’s uber-anchor Alex Levy—who was also secretly plotting to subsume Alex’s network for his own nefarious and narcissistic purposes.
When Alex spoiled Paul’s plans and kicked him to the curb it seemed like we’d seen the last of Hamm—but he turned up again early in season 4, and returned this week in an episode that brought Paul back into the plot, and Alex’s life, in a major way as he put his career on the line to help Alex try to rescue Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon) who’s been detained on charges of espionage against Belarus (like I said, this show is kind of insane) only to be secretly thwarted by his right-hand man, played by Tig Notaro.
I had a wide-ranging, fun conversation with Hamm over breakfast this past spring for his GQ Hype profile, but this time he called me from the set of his latest project to talk specifically about The Morning Show, dramatizing the morally grey tech billionaires our country is beholden to in real life, and turning up to Bad Bunny.
GQ: Watching season three, it felt like Paul’s arc was a one-season arc kind of thing, so it was a pleasant surprise when you popped up for an encore in season 4. What were some of the conversations involved around bringing your character back?
Jon Hamm: Well, without getting too into conversations above my pay grade, I think what we had really discussed was that maybe there’s just more story there to tell and that these two characters had more to get through in their relationship. And I think both Jennifer and I felt that way, and the response to the character was really good from an audience standpoint. And I think from a dramatic standpoint, there was certainly some more to be mined in that particular load. And honestly, we both had a lot of fun with it, so we were very excited to come back and revisit the relationship here. That’s really what the gist of it was.
How much of that decision was a result of the natural chemistry between you and Jennifer—did that make it feel necessary to keep exploring there?
I think that was a big part of it. Honestly, that kind of jumps off the screen at you. I think we really— not only just us as actors and people who know each other personally and socially—we like working together, and the way the writers constructed that relationship, they had left it relatively open-ended. Obviously, neither one of us had anything catastrophic happen to us, so there still was a world in which these two people’s orbits would still intersect. And I think that the way that the writers had constructed [the story] as well, there were still some emotional leftovers that they had to manage their way through.
What do you enjoy about working with Jennifer specifically? Didn’t you once say she’s the one who reached out to you in the first place about joining the show?
I can’t remember if she reached out or or somebody from the higher-ups had reached out, but it was definitely something that was a no-brainer once it was presented, I think, to both of us that this would be a really interesting fit. And we both really sparked to the idea. I remember sitting in the room with the writers and discussing what might it look like. Jennifer was in those meetings as well as she’s an executive producer and we both just were on the same page from the beginning and thought, let’s really make this an interesting situation for both characters, not just for Alex Levy to have to navigate a relationship, but also for Paul, and getting into a relationship with somebody who’s so high-profile. What does that look like to characters that are in their 50s and successful and what are the wants and needs in a relationship? And I thought they did a great job of accurately presenting that.
It’s funny, there’s so many relationships on the show that are in a constant state of fluctuation, but it feels like you guys have now become endgame. There’s a “ship” element to it now—people want you crazy kids to figure it out.
Yeah, I think part of that obviously comes from the chemistry that we both have, but I think part of it too is that those two fit very nicely in each other’s lives.
Well, I mean, yeah, in order to have a redemption arc, you have to have something to redeem yourself for. So that is sort of the natural wave for anyone that comes in and is a bit antagonistic—if they return, that’s the second act. And then we’ll see what the third act brings. But without spoiling anything, I think they did a really nice job of presenting this in a real way. Alex has something that she needs from Paul. Paul has some ability to provide that for her, and that brings them closer and back into each other’s orbits again. And there is something undeniable between the two of them.
I was always intrigued by Tig Notaro’s character and the nature of her and Paul’s relationship, and obviously that becomes a really interesting wrinkle in this week’s episode. But a lot of their dynamic or lore isn’t made explicit in the show. Have you and Tig had ever discussed what their backstory might be?
We never really discussed it explicitly. I think it was just sort of left to be interpreted as this is a longtime employee and confidant of Paul’s. And Tig and I go back 20 some-odd years. There’s a built-in relationship there already. We don’t really work together, but we have a lot of friends in common. So we do have an intertwined past with friends and relationships and whatnot. I’ve known Tig through many iterations of her career and her life, and we’ve been friends through it all. And she’s known me through various versions of my life before I was famous, before I was on Mad Men, blah, blah, blah.
So in many ways our careers have grown together and I’ve always been a fan of hers. And I think her specific energy and her particular approach lends itself to being very kind of off-putting. What is that relationship? But I think that’s very much on purpose to keep the audience wondering, Is she secretly pulling some strings behind the scenes? Does she know more than she lets on? And then Tig has a tremendous ability to play things very close to the vest. And I think that that’s very helpful in creating the kind of dramatic confusion or wonder that her character plays that’s presented.
When you initially joined, your character represented putting a face to this concept of these modern, immediate anxieties about big tech and specifically big tech encroaching on the media. Now in this season Paul is also wrapped up in this other prevalent anxiety, this idea of foreign powers interfering with American politics and journalism. So I just wanted to know what you make of all of that being dramatized here, and if you think that’s important to present it here in this fictional context as we’re dealing with it in real time in the real world?
Well, I think one of the pitches I remember thinking about was, what if we had tech oligarchs that weren’t necessarily all completely narcissistic and completely profit-motivated, and what if some of them had the country’s and others better interest at heart? Google’s first slogan for want of a better word or logo or whatever was just “Don’t be evil” and things like that. And then as they slowly grind up and assume everything that’s in their path, their actions start to resemble, kind of, evil, a little bit.