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"\n\njanuary wants to go to the Chili's near the H Gates. She loves the queso there. Loves it even though it doesn't always come in one of those little cast-iron skillets like at regular Chili's and they don't have a \"red beer\" (beer and tomato juice) here like she's seen at the franchise's other midwestern outlets. It doesn't matter that the place is noisy and crowded and the only TV is tucked way up behind the bar and she probably won't be able to catch the last preseason Bears game. The queso's that good.\n\n While we wait for a table, she explains that she also feels a bit of nostalgia for this particular O'Hare branch of the chain: She passes through here a lot when taking time off from acting\u2014traveling home, say, to her parents' house in Des Moines around the holidays. So it's fitting that she's here tonight, fresh from taping Oprah with Mad Men co-star Jon Hamm and at the beginning of a Labor Day break from shooting the series' third season. The two of us are headed back to Los Angeles on a seven-thirty flight.\n\n \"I'm on vacation,\" she says as she navigates a beat-up old Nike-brand roller bag through the crowd of overstuffed patrons. \"It's time to relax.\"\n\n We order our queso and beers, and she proceeds to do exactly that. Jones still has her Oprah makeup on and is wearing dark jeans, boots, and a skintight black top\u2014the kind of outfit almost conspicuous in its intent not to draw attention, but no one notices her. She curls deep into the corner of our booth, and we talk aimlessly, first about football (\"My screen saver is a photo of me with Peyton and Eli at the Kentucky Derby\") and then about the constant ups and downs of her career. \"It was great when it blew up at Cannes,\" she says of the film she's most proud of, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, directed by Tommy Lee Jones (no relation). \"But everyone thought it was a nepotism thing. There was one journalist who asked, \u2018How is it, being directed by your father?' \"\n\n The conversation is easy, funny, and familiar, but also strange, because it's so damn un-Betty-Draper-like. Jones has been around Hollywood for a decade and has had her share of memorable small performances in big films, but nothing that's come close to the cultural icon that is Mrs. Draper, a character that's become an obsessive fixation of, and bold provocation to, male desire. Jones has managed to occupy the character so seamlessly and convincingly that it's almost a career liability. \"I'd never really played a mom or a wife before,\" she says, \"and all of a sudden I'm getting all these lonely mom and wife offers. I don't want to get stuck.\"\n\n But she's not too worried about it. First, the emotionally inhibited '60s housewife is such a specific role. \"It's not like being on Friends or something,\" she says. And being identified so strongly with her character is, in a way, a testament to the quality of her work. Jones proudly tells the story of Jack Nicholson, with whom she acted in 2003's Anger Management, having watched nearly the entire first season of the show without realizing that she was Betty Draper. \"That was pretty awesome,\" she says of getting the call from Nicholson. It was a kind of vindication, especially since not everyone in Hollywood has always been so positive.\n\n \"The guy I was dating when I first got to L.A. was not supportive of my acting,\" she says. \"He was like, I don't think you're going to be good at this. So\u2014fuck you! He only has nice things to say now\u2014if anything, I should thank him. Because the minute you tell me I can't do something, that's when I'm most motivated.\"\n\n By the time she's telling me this, we've finished our beers and queso and are sitting in our seats for Los Angeles, and I'm too occupied with figuring out who the \"guy I was dating\" is to take this story as it should be taken: as a warning. Because by now, January has already finished her first in-flight drink and is giving me a hard time for being slow on mine. It's clear that she's taking the notion of having fun on her \"vacation\" very seriously; it's up to me to keep pace. Shouldn't be a problem, I think. She's so small\u2014give her another beer or two and she'll be asleep.\n\n Mistake number one: doing what that skeptical boyfriend (as it turns out, a guy named Ashton Kutcher) did and doubt January Jones. Because she will be so pleased\u2014resolutely, ruthlessly, perhaps a tad too gleefully\u2014to prove your ass wrong.\n\n\n\n marv jones likes to tell a story about Bruce Willis and his daughter's first major film, Bandits\u2014a bank-heist romp that came out in 2001, when January was 23. \"Bruce said, \u2018When I first heard the name January Jones, I thought: I need to meet this girl. She'll be a star,' \" remembers Marv.\n\n That kind of reaction is why January Jones gets asked a lot if January is her actual name\u2014it sounds too showbiz, or peep show, to be true. But the name is real. Embarrassingly so. Her parents plucked it from the lead character in Jacqueline Susann's Once Is Not Enough, a romantic novel that climas with a drug-fueled, ellipsis-filled orgy. (\"Someone was spreading her legs\u2026in and out\u2026in and out\u2026fuck\u2026suck\u2026everyone was loving her.\" January: \"Imagine realizing you're named after that character.\")\n\n The rest of the first-class cabin is quiet, and January is leaning back into the seat, clutching a cashmere blanket she bought earlier today at the Oprah store with her family, who'd come to Chicago to see her. She's drinking Bud Light now, telling stories about growing up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where her family moved from Hecla (population 314) after she was born. \"I hung out with dudes in high school,\" she says. \"We were the hippies\u2014into the Dead, Zeppelin, Phish. I was a lifeguard at the water park, and I remember the day Jerry died. Over the loudspeaker, it said: \u2018Jerry Garcia has died. Everybody meet in the parking lot.' I probably shouldn't say that\u2014we were saving lives! But that was definitely a sit-in-the-chair-with-sunglasses afternoon.\"\n\n Despite spending high school with the stoner crowd, she graduated early and, at 18, departed for New York City to model, mostly because she didn't know what else she wanted to do\u2014and, she jokes, she liked the idea of \"showing all those bitches in high school who said I wasn't pretty enough\" that she was. She settled into a models' apartment and started dating Julian Steinberg, whose father, Saul, a notorious Wall Street raider, had made billions during the '70s and '80s. Julian was a senior at the Trinity School, one of the nation's most exclusive private schools, and the culture shock of arriving from small-town South Dakota, where she'd worked at a Dairy Queen and lifeguarded, to what was essentially the set of Gossip Girl should have been jarring\u2014had January realized exactly how privileged her new world was.\n\n \"I was naive,\" she says. \"I just figured that that's what everyone in New York was like.\"\n\n While dating Steinberg, January became close friends with his mother, Laura, an Italian fireball of a woman whose dramatic divorce from Saul had been a staple of the New York tabloids in the early '80s. (She allegedly pointed a shotgun at the woman she caught in the act with her husband, causing the naked mistress to leap from a second-story window.) Laura became something of a surrogate mother, taking January on far-flung vacations\u2014a wedding in Italy, a month in Bali\u2014even after January had split with her son.\n\n \"Laura taught me how to hold my knife and fork and to be a lady,\" says January. \"To keep my forearms on the table\u2014never my elbows\u2014and place my napkin on my lap. She got me out of the models' apartment, and my Fargo accent was really strong then, so she taught me how to speak.\"\n\n January spent a year or so in New York, modeling for the likes of Abercrombie, and then spent a few lonely, existential months in Paris\u2014reading Ayn Rand, listening to OK Computer, and of course, moping around\n\n Jim Morrison's P\u00E8re Lachaise grave site\u2014which prompted a change of direction. \"You're like an object. They move you around. And I felt like, God, I'm miserable. I hate modeling,\" she says. \"When I moved back to New York, the agency said I owed them $20,000. So I left the agency and then\u2014very quickly\u2014decided to go to L.A. and try acting. Without any training.\"\n\n It did not go well. Jones would go to auditions and just emote, channeling whatever feelings she could muster from her real life\u2014loneliness, anger, heartache\u2014into the character she'd been asked to read. \"I felt really vulnerable,\" she says. \"Like, why do these people deserve to see me have these emotions for five minutes and then tell me that I'm bad at it?\"\n\n But eventually, through audition after audition, she learned not just to feel vulnerable but to play it. \"January has an athletic intensity to her acting, a very instinctive kind of immediacy,\" says Mad Men creator Matt Weiner, who wrote modeling into Betty's backstory during the show's first season. \"She found a way to make Betty's lack of self-awareness so believable by bringing in this mix of hardness and childishness, which she saw Betty having\u2014this ability to want something, and go for it in an almost childish way.\"\n\n It's this impulsive, childish energy that makes Betty Draper so alluring, so intriguing, so threatening\u2014she's a pre-women's-lib vessel of confused feminine energy, a libidinous force yearning to escape. When Jones is at her best, it's raw, frightening, and most of all, seductive: the kind of performance that requires either topflight training or a lot of work. \"January didn't go to acting school,\" says Jon Hamm. \"And for someone to pull that off\u2014someone who's just present and learning as she goes\u2014it's impressive.\"\n\n Yet even with Mad Men's success, January's feelings of vulnerability haven't entirely disappeared. Especially since there were plenty of times\u2014both in New York, where Laura Steinberg would sometimes help her with her rent, and later, even after some successful movies in Hollywood\u2014when it seemed that she'd have no choice but to return to South Dakota. \"There have been so many moments in my life where I was just like, That's it, I'm going home,\" she says. \"And then my agent'll be like, \u2018Just do this little movie; it'll be fine.' \"\n\n I tell her that I've just picked up a copy of Taboo, a teen horror flick she made in Romania with Nick Stahl in 2001.\n\n \"Oh, don't see that! Please don't see that,\" she laughs. \"They were paying in cash. When it premiered at Sundance, Nick and I walked out of our own premiere. I was like, This is embarrassing, and I'm going home to get drunk, right now. Your agent tells you no one will ever see this. And then you're doing an interview years and years later and\u2026\n\n \"No regrets,\" she says. \"I got here.\"\n\n And then she offers some advice: \"Just get high. That's the only way to watch it. Get really high.\"\n\n\n\n\"lifehouse makes me cry\u2014is that a weakness? So does Maxwell! I need another beer.\"\n\n She pushes the little yellow flight-attendant button.\n\n \"Love pressing that,\" she says. \"Makes me feel powerful.\"\n\n By now, we have our iPods out. Hers is an older-model green nano with a pink sleeve, a gift from Jon Hamm.\n\n \"My favorites right now are\u2026 Muse is my favorite! I can't wait for their new CD. And I like Manchester Orchestra. Mos Def's Quiet Dog. And I like the Fray, actually. I put on a lot of weird stuff.\"\n\n The flight attendant\u2014older, highlights, annoyed\u2014arrives.\n\n \"Can I get another Bud Light?\"\n\n \"I think there's only one left,\" says the attendant.\n\n \"You know what? She's trying to cut us off,\" January says when she's gone.\n\n \"Apparently we're badly behaved.\"\n\n \"No, we're not! I remember being on a British Airways flight with a friend where we got cut off big-time. You know in first class, where they have tables in between the seats? Well, we were chewing tobacco and playing quarters. And they were like, You are cut off! Go to bed!\"\n\n \"You definitely didn't need college if you can play quarters.\"\n\n \"Yeah, I don't feel like I missed anything. I'm a beer-pong champion! Among my friends, anyway.\"\n\n This seems like a good time to ask what she does for fun in L.A.\n\n \"Well. I don't really go to clubs all that much\u2014I just like going to friends' houses, playing Wii, having a beach fire in Malibu. I'm always the first person at every party to ask if we can make a fire.\"\n\n She stops.\n\n \"A fire?\" I ask.\n\n \"Yeah.\" And then, very, very slowly: \"I\u2026like\u2026fire.\"\n\n I laugh.\n\n \"What am I even saying? These are just ridiculous sound bites that you're going to put in the caption next to me being naked.\"\n\n\n\nwe are drunk. Or at least I am. January swears that she's not really drunk at all, that she's been known to have a twelve-pack from time to time (liquor doesn't agree with her), and that once, in high school, she downed twenty-six beers in a single night. (\"I threw up a lot. But it was a contest.... I hope this story isn't only about drinking.\") She's talking about Halloween now, her favorite holiday, and the time she went to the Playboy Mansion as Michael Jackson.\n\n \"It didn't really go over so well,\" she says. \"I went all out: mask, gloves, face powdered, everything. And all the rest of the girls were just painted.\" This year, she's planning to dress up as Troy Polamalu. \"I'll get the wig. Put on some bronzer. And I'll just cross myself all night,\" she says, mulling it over. \"Or maybe I'll be Houshmandzadeh.\"\n\n It's hard to tell whether she's just saying that because it's unexpected or because she's actually planning it or because she's talking to a men's magazine. Doesn't matter. It's hilarious. And it helps explain why her first success in Hollywood was through comedy. Not long after arriving in town, she started hanging out at Jason Segel's house, where the Judd Apatow crew was working on a pilot called North Hollywood. \"We'd all get together at Jason's house to improv and write,\" she says. \"We'd do this fake talk-show game where someone would be the host and someone would be the guest. It'd be like: You're Sharon Stone and I'm Conan O'Brien. Go!\"\n\n The show didn't get picked up, but the training proved useful for other roles. In Anger Management, most of January's scenes with her lover\u2014Jones plays a lesbian porn star\u2014were improvised, often with encouragement from Adam Sandler (\"Whenever there was a lull in the dialogue, Adam would be like, \u2018Yo, suck on her finger!' \"). A short time later, she was cast as a ditzy American flirt in Richard Curtis's ensemble Love Actually.\n\n \"The minute I got on-set, I started improvising,\" she says, \"and before long the producer takes me aside and says, \u2018You don't do that with Mr. Curtis's scripts.' I got all defensive and said that the script didn't sound like an American girl. The whole time I'm thinking: Fuck, I'm going to get fired. But Richard came in and was like, \u2018Well, how would you say it?' \"\n\n \"I normally don't allow anyone to change any lines at all, but I remember her being particularly bright,\" says Curtis, who was taken enough with January's impromptu performance to cast her in his next film, this month's Pirate Radio. \"I know it's a clich\u00E9 that the prettiest of girls don't become comediennes, as it were, but for a man who's obsessed with that Grace Kelly look\u2014you know, that completely classic America beauty\u2014tied in with the fact that she's funny as well\u2026 It was quite a combination.\"\n\n The Grace Kelly comparison is one that January has been getting a lot lately, and although it's flattering she mostly finds it uncomfortable. If you ask why, she'll give the easy answer\u2014that it sets an impossible standard. But somewhere high over Utah or maybe Nevada, sitting next to a woman who, over the course of the evening, has started speaking in endearing \"You knooow\"s, it seems like there's another, deeper reason for her discomfort: January Jones really doesn't want to be a Grace Kelly type. She'd prefer to be herself\u2014a casual, unrestrained midwestern woman whose very unlikeness to Grace Kelly is maybe the best thing about her. Sure, she can pull off the look (just do her hair and her makeup and put her in the passenger seat of a Coupe de Ville) and the poise (watch Betty Draper any Sunday night), but that's not her.\n\n Or, at least, not entirely.\n\n \"I don't have a lot in common with Betty,\" she says. \"but I'm very protective of her. I just feel like she's trying really hard to make her life good, and make her marriage work, and it just seems hypocritical that when she slips up, people get mad. Because Don does it all the fucking time.\"\n\n\n\n we have a breakfast date set for the next morning, at a little place in Los Feliz, to make sure we can cover the sorts of topics (\"So, are you single?\") that might be awkward to talk about over beers on a four-hour flight. January walks in\u2014jeans, sunglasses, loose-fitting top\u2014and promptly announces that she had two more beers after returning home from the airport, pushing her grand total up toward eight.\n\n \"You remember last night?\" I ask. \"You said that in high school you once drank twenty-six!\"\n\n \"I did drink twenty-six,\" she replies coolly.\n\n She's not wearing makeup, and her face looks smooth, girlish. I order coffee, she orders orange juice, and we talk about her love life. Jones has dated her share of high-profile guys (Kutcher, soft-rock crooner Josh Groban), but after the breakup of a several-year relationship earlier this spring, she's now dating a friend she has known for eight years, a lawyer who lives in Oregon. (\"What I want is James Brolin in Amityville Horror, minus the horror. A guy with a beard who can swing an ax.\")\n\n January is just as friendly and funny this morning as the night before, but without the weird enforced intimacy of the flight\u2014the close seats, the drinks, the dim lights\u2014our meeting feels businesslike. For the first time, I can see why, in other interviews, she often comes off as distant: the aloof pretty girl, unfailingly polite but also self-protecting, a little more Betty Draper than the woman who, after her fifth round last night, picked up the digital recorder and announced: \"Dear men of America, I like beer, I like football. I'm probably the most interesting girl you'll ever meet.\"\n\n It's that January Jones\u2014the queso-eating, Fargo-speaking, tobacco-chewing girl\u2014who makes you scratch your head. Who shows you the kind of transformation a good actress undergoes. Who causes you to think, just like Jack Nicholson did: Is that really you?\n\nmark kirby is a GQ senior editor."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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