LOS ANGELES—You wouldn't think that a Vanity Fair cover story on Jon Hamm, who is referred to in a cover blurb as "Hollywood's Handsomest Leading Man," would need to add a little porn into the mix to spice things up, but then again, it couldn't hurt. Now, of course, all of the other media promoting the issue are also going with porn in their headlines. Birds of a feather, as they say.
What is kind of funny is that the porn story in the piece is one Hamm has told several times before in interviews conducted over the years, implying he's kind of fond of it. The way Vanity Fair presents it, in their own promo for the May 8 issue, "In an extensive interview, Hamm talks to [contributing editor Jim] Windolf about that recently resurfaced episode of The Big Date from 1996, revealing that the show came at a low point: 'I was actually at that time working as a set dresser for Cinemax soft-core-porn movies,' he says. 'It was soul-crushing.'"
But 'soul-crushing' seems to be only his latest way of expressing how depressing it was to work on a soft-porn set. Down through the years, Hamm has found different ways of articulating his distaste for the work.
HuffPo did the heavy lifting finding the previous mentions, including two in 2009—one for Elle, and the other for Letterman on The Late Show—another in 2010, for The Guardian, then again in 2012 during a "Hamm-porn-tour of sorts," and three more times that year, in March, April and June, for Anderson Cooper, Playboy and The Hollywood Reporter, respectively.
The good news is that the story has remained pretty consistent over the years, even if there isn't much to it, and there is a lot more being discussed in the Vanity Fair interview than how depressed Hamm was working on the "Skinemax" set. Like the time he played Trivial Pursuit with Paul Rudd during his high school years.
Woot-woot!
