Jon Hamm
Actor Jon Hamm appears on stage at the unveiling of the Mercedes-Benz S63 AMG Coupe at the New York International Auto Show in New York City, April 16, 2014. REUTERS/Mike Segar Reuters

Jon Hamm may be crushing hearts and dreams today as Don Draper in “Mad Men,” but back in his younger days, he wasn’t the one doing the crushing. The 43-year-old actor recalled a time when he was working on a “soul-crushing” job in soft porn films.

A video of Hamm’s mid-‘90s appearance on a dating show was recently unearthed. The clip shows the dashing actor as a long-haired 25-year-old waiter who failed to charm the bachelorette with his “evening of fabulousity.”

In a new Vanity Fair interview, Hamm said that he appeared in that dating show about the time that he was also working on soft-core porn films.

And it wasn’t a job that he would like to repeat.

“I was actually at that time working as a set dresser for Cinemax soft-core-porn movies. It was soul-crushing,” he told the magazine simply.

It wasn’t the first time he described his previous job as “soul-crushing,” though. In a 2009 interview with Elle magazine, he said that it was the low-point of his life.

“I’m, like, $150 a day? I will totally do that… But it was soul-crushingly depressing. There was no actual f******, but it was so sad; the actors were dead but they were trying their best. I was like, ‘Man, this can’t f****** be it.’”

Fortunately, he has found other careers that weren’t as depressing as the porn one. He took on a role in the U.S. drama series “Providence,” and has a one-line appearance in Clint Eastwood’s “Space Cowboys” in 2000. He has also landed a few television and film roles after, but the biggest turning point in his career was when he was cast as Don Draper in “Mad Men.”

“This is the best job I’ve ever had and maybe ever will in my life – it’s so fun to play all of this,” he told Vanity Fair.

“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.”

The critics also clearly thought that he is doing a remarkable job as the enigmatic Don. In 2008, he won a Golden Globe Awards for Best Actor in a drama series for that particular role. He has also amassed a number of nominations with the rest of the cast, including Emmy Award nods.