It was a long road for Jon Hamm to become Don Draper.

While a recently resurfaced clip of the actor’s stint on “The Big Date” in 1996 thrilled “Mad Men” fans, Hamm, 43, remembers that period in his life differently, The New York Post reports.

“I was actually at that time working as a set dresser for Cinemax soft-core-porn movies,” he says in Vanity Fair’s June issue. “It was soul-crushing.”

Hamm adds that he’s well aware that portraying Draper is the role of a lifetime.

“This is the best job I’ve ever had and maybe ever will have in my life — it’s so fun to play all of this,” he explains. “It can be relentlessly dark. It can be terribly sexually inappropriate, is a way to say it. But who else gets a chance to do any of that stuff? There’s so much there.”

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