Mad Men's Jon Hamm is the talk of The Town

Star of award-winning US drama takes a break from his day job playing an ad man to promote new Ben Affleck movie at the Venice film festival

Xan Brooks in Venice

Thursday 9 September 2010 15.51 BST

 Jon Hamm as FBI special agent Adam Frawley in The Town, directed by Ben Affleck

It seemed significant that the biggest cheers at the Venice press conference for The Town were not for Ben Affleck, the film's director and star. Nor were they for the British actor Rebecca Hall or for Jeremy Renner, the Oscar-nominated star of The Hurt Locker. Instead they went to Mad Men mainstay Jon Hamm, a small-screen actor who has come to eclipse his big-screen counterparts.

Hamm shot his supporting role in The Town during a break from his day job on the multiple-award-winning US drama. But the likes of Mad Men, he said, proved that TV could no longer be written off as a poor cousin of Hollywood. "These days you can watch things like our show, or Dexter, that wouldn't have had a prayer five years ago," he told reporters. He said the fragmentation of the television industry had "brought us the opportunity to tell more specific stories". "The old, larger network model meant you could only make shows that appealed to a super-broad spectrum," he said. "But now people are able to watch on their phone or their laptops, all over the world. These days you can appeal to a much smaller audience and still make money."

Sitting beside him on stage, Affleck was more succinct: "What they're doing with Mad Men is better than what most Hollywood movies are doing, that's for sure."

The Town is a Boston-set crime drama that casts Hamm, 39, as a driven FBI agent on the trail of a band of bank robbers. It is a far cry from his role as Don Draper, the enigmatic 1960s ad executive he has played in four seasons of the cable TV show. "It gets kind of boring when you're banging the same piano key your entire life," he explained. "After the first and second seasons of Mad Men I got sent about 40 scripts that were all set in the 60s, or had me playing advertising guys. So it was appealing to be able to work with Ben on a contemporary film, and to play a character who is the opposite to Don Draper in terms of his moral certainty."

Hamm added that Mad Men traditionally shoots during the summer, leaving him six months free to pursue other acting work. In addition to The Town, he recently completed work on a role in the Allen Ginsberg biopic Howl. Hamm co-stars as John Ehrlich, the lawyer who defended the American poet at his 1957 obscenity trial.

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