Those crazy kids
Jon Hamm and Eiza González are ‘Baby Driver’s very own Bonnie and Clyde
“You look at everything about these two and them together, and you think, ‘Well, this is not going to end well.’ ” Jon Hamm
In a movie all about fast cars and fast living, it’s not hard to see that Jon Hamm’s hair in Baby Driver — buzzed on the sides, longish and slicked back everywhere else — is fittingly aerodynamic.
Tell Hamm that and you receive a laugh in return. “I guess. I’ve gotten a lot of nice feedback,” he says in his trailer on a sunny April morning, getting ready for a day of filming. “Rob Lowe once said, ‘Living your life in the public eye is just a succession of bad haircuts,’ and never has that been more true.”
His signature role as Don Draper in TV’s Mad Men was a series of questionable life decisions, yet he goes full criminal along with co-star Eiza González, playing robbers Buddy and Darling in
Baby Driver (in theaters Wednesday). The resident Bonnie and Clyde of an Atlanta heist crew, the duo team up often with the town’s top getaway driver, Baby (Ansel Elgort), and when they’re not robbing something, they’re making out or pawing at each other like there’s no tomorrow — and in their business, that might be true.
“They’re very much into each other in a very visceral and physical way,” says Hamm, 46. “You look at everything about these two and them together, and you think, ‘Well, this is not going to end well.’ And it doesn’t. Spoiler alert.”
Buddy is an older ex-Wall Street type who’s not handling a midlife crisis very well, and one of those poor choices is falling for gun-toting Darling, whom González, 27, describes as a “crook space-cadet woman who has no attachment to reality. She really wants to be classy because she’s getting all this money to dress nicely, but she’s still really trashy.”
The Mexican actress, who starred as vampire Santanico Pandemonium on cable channel El Rey’s From Dusk Till Dawn:
The Series and plays a cyborg in Robert Rodriguez’s upcoming scifi film Alita: Battle Angel (2018), loves her and Hamm’s matching tattoos, which showcase the “codependency and the craziness of the characters.” They have their wedding date inked on them, as well as “Hers” on Buddy’s neck and “His” on Darling ’s. “It’s a very possessive, psychotic thing to do.”
While Buddy isn’t as complicated as Don Draper, both have to deal with the consequences of their decisions.
“Everybody has high stakes in their life: It just might be, ‘ My marriage is collapsing ’ or ‘I hate my job’ or ‘I want to be an artist and not a businessman,’ ” says Hamm. “Buddy traded a life like that for one of actual high stakes, where people do put their lives in danger, and he’s realizing that there’s only one way that ends.
“The romantic part of the criminals-on-the-run thing rarely takes that part into it. There’s a reason freeze-frame usually ends a lot of those movies and not bullet-riddled bodies.”