Jon Hamm is reflecting on what it’s like to be famous. On what it’s like to be Jon Hamm. “Everyone that goes through it goes crazy,” he says, matter-of-factly. He was told this a long time ago by a friend, the late director Mike Nichols, during the early days of Mad Men, when a handsome drifter from St Louis transformed from mid-thirties journeyman actor – knocking around town, waiting tables, occasionally booking roles such as “Gorgeous Guy at Bar” on Ally McBeal and a bit part on What About Brian – into an Emmy-winning star of prestige television’s Golden Age.

“It’s just about how you handle your crazy,” he says, taking a sip of his Diet Coke. “There’s a fallout that happens when you go through it, and some people don’t survive it.”

The sun is shining in Los Angeles. We’re sat in Hamm’s favourite restaurant, a place so familiar to him that there’s a plaque bearing his name on one of the booths. It’s the beginning of the lunchtime rush. Tourists are ordering sandwiches and a man is hunched over an iPad, doing something that looks very important while two women discuss an upcoming birthday at a volume that could best be described as “communal”. A toddler pops up from behind a neighbouring booth and pulls a face at Hamm, so he pulls one back.

“You learn to understand that a lot of it is ephemeral,” he says in between mouthfuls of tuna salad.

Hamm had walked through the door looking a bit like a contemporary version of The Dude… if The Dude looked like Cary Grant. He’s wearing a green corduroy cap, tinted orange sunglasses, a faded black hoodie, shorts and a well-worn T-shirt featuring the cover art for George Harrison’s 1970 album All Things Must Pass. He has a strong midwestern handshake and some grey in his hair.

“A lot of it is a moment in time that won’t happen again. Or it might happen again and you’ll get lucky and lightning might strike twice… You never know,” he says. “I’ve been very fortunate to be consistent with my output and to like what I do.”

Apple TV’s Your Friends & Neighbours could just be Hamm’s second strike of lightning. The show is returning for its second season, with a third already commissioned. Hamm plays Andrew “Coop” Cooper, a surface-level suave hedge-fund guy in the grips of an existential and very material crisis who, through various degrees of hubris, desperation and boredom, turns to looting the sterile McMansions of his fellow one-per-centers. It doesn’t all go according to plan.

“I only ever saw Jon in the role of Coop,” says Jonathan Tropper, the show’s creator. “And, so, before I wrote a single word, I was fortunate enough to score a meeting with him, where I pitched him the idea of the show. He got it right away and his enthusiasm is what motivated me to write the pilot. If that meeting hadn’t gone well, I don’t think the show would have happened.”

Tropper was inspired by 15 years spent living in a ritzy Westchester County enclave, watching the fortunes of the people around him ebb and flow. “I can’t write a character like Coop without putting a good deal of myself and my own mid-life ennui into him,” he says. “But at the same time, he’s a complicated amalgam of that along with a certain confidence and arrogance unique to finance guys, alpha males bolstered by success.”

Your Friends & Neighbours also marks Hamm’s first true return to leading-man status since his epochal seven-season run as Don Draper, where he embodied the brilliant, boozing, womanising, Lucky Strike-choked dark heart of mid-century masculinity. The whisky industry probably owes him a hefty commission for what he did to sales of old fashioneds during that time.

Seven gruelling auditions were required before Hamm got the role of Don. He was 34 years old. There’s a story, possibly apocryphal, that after one such audition, the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, turned to the others in the room and said, “That man wasn’t raised by his parents.”

“I didn’t know those people at all when we started,” Hamm says, poking at the remnants of his salad. “Only John Slattery a little bit. It was incredibly fortunate how it all turned out; we were all best friends for 10 years. The show was what it was, and we were all happy to be part of it, we all built careers out of it. Sometimes it works out.”

It was also a job that came with a unique set of pressures: the first name on the call sheet, the main man. A responsibility that, as he puts it, requires a certain mindset. “It’s ego, it’s confidence, there are a million different words for it, but if you don’t have it, the audience might not follow you. It doesn’t mean that you don’t get anxious. There are a lot of ‘what ifs?’ But it’s about taking that anxiety and energy and focusing it outwards.

“It’s a real lesson. Some people have it, some people have it and lose it, and some people can’t manage it, and it eats them up.”

“With leading men, it’s an intangible quality,” Tropper says when I ask him about what sets an actor like Hamm apart from the rest. “Maybe something behind their eyes, that conveys a certain kind of warmth and intelligence. There’s just something about how they act onscreen that elicits an unconscious empathy and relatability from the viewer. Maybe it’s also a certain type of vulnerability. But I don’t think it can really be quantified.”

“I really think so much of his brilliance comes from the fact that he’s funny,” adds Amanda Peet, who plays Hamm’s onscreen ex-wife Mel in Your Friends & Neighbours. “But also, because he’s complicated and deep and doesn’t give everything away.”

Hamm was 10 when his mother died and 20 when his father, who he has previously described as a big fish in a small pond and part of his inspiration for Don Draper, passed. “I’m part of a weird and small club of people who lost their parents very young,” Hamm says. “So, there’s also the added ‘joy’ of not having the traditional element of leadership or help growing up and having to navigate all of that relatively alone.

“I’ve always been a little bit outside my friend group,” he adds. “My first set of friends got married at 23, right out of college, while I was single until I was in my late twenties. They were all making money in the 1990s and I was waiting tables, poor as fuck. When I became successful, they were all getting laid off, so I’ve always been slightly on the other side of things.”

After Mad Men ended in 2015, Hamm approached his newfound career freedom in a way that surprised many of his industry peers. He took on roles that were weird, funny and unexpected. A comedy obsessive, he fulfilled a childhood dream by hosting Saturday Night Live and made appearances on 30 Rock and Curb Your Enthusiasm. He played a deadbeat boyfriend in Bridesmaids, an FBI agent in Ben Affleck’s The Town, a duplicitous psychopath in Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver and a tech oligarch alongside Jennifer Aniston, another old friend, in The Morning Show.

A chance to appear alongside Tom Cruise in the 2022 Top Gun sequel led to him calling up his agents and asking that they get the deal done, no matter what.

“After you get the job, you have to do the job,” he says. “I say it to friends of mine and other actors. It goes under the category of ‘be careful what you wish for’, but if it’s a success, make sure it’s something you want to do. You might be doing it for a long time and if you fucking hate it or find it unfulfilling in some way, it’s going to show. There’s nothing worse than watching something when you can tell they’re only in it for the paycheque.

“One of the greatest examples of it for me was being on set with Tom Cruise,” he continues. “He works at an incredibly high level and has a huge amount of control over what he does. But there are a lot of guys in that position who take it for granted, and he does not.

“He is 100 per cent committed to every moment that he is on stage. He knows that without him, a $500m production, none of it happens, so he’s 100 per cent all the time and it’s infectious. That’s how I try to be when I’m number one on the call sheet. I certainly did it as Don Draper.”

The restaurant is beginning to thin out as the afternoon wears on. One of the reasons that Hamm loves this place so much is that, during a certain period of his life, when he lived nearby, he could come in and wait for something to happen.

“It’s like my pub,” he says fondly. “You have a bite to eat, some friends come by, then they’d leave, some more friends would drop in, you could stay for four hours, meet seven different groups. It’s a neighbourhood spot.”

He pulls out his phone and shows me a photo of him and Warren Beatty, sat in this very booth. He shakes his head in slight disbelief at the memory. “Bananas.”

“We both lived around the corner,” says the director Edgar Wright, the architect and photographer behind that Beatty dinner, when I ask him about their long afternoons in Los Feliz. “I’ve been in Jon’s booth many times! Even outside of work, he’s one of my first calls to catch up and get together and bullshit.

“What’s interesting about Jon is that he has incredibly commanding good looks,” Wright adds. “But that inherent handsomeness, one of the most handsome men on the planet, then makes him a very fascinating figure given his different facets. I’ve mentioned he’s a great comedic actor, but he’s also an incredible dramatic actor. He has a great deadpan presence as well. You can talk to him about anything and everything.”

“There’s a Sam Shepard solidness to him,” says Tina Fey, another close friend. “He also has a sense of humour when, evolutionarily, he really does not need one.”