Jon Hamm discusses suffering from rare skin condition

Jon Hamm has discussed how he deals with a skin condition that flared up when he started filming Mad Men.

The 53-year-old American actor had been acting for over a decade before he hit the big time as advertising creative Don Draper in the smash AMC period drama that ran from 2007 until 2015.

But while his professional life began to come together, his body started to turn against him as he suddenly developed vitiligo - a skin condition that drains pigmentation, can become itchy and affects less than one per cent of the global population.

Discussing how the condition has affected him since it emerged in 2007, he told The Hollywood Reporter, "It's waxed and waned. It's a pigmentation thing. Michael Jackson had it.

"It affects the Black community significantly more because you have melanin in your skin and it goes away. But I remember waking up one day while shooting the pilot, and it looked like someone had dropped bleach on my chin. Then I looked at my hands and shins, and they had these patches on them."

Explaining that the condition hasn't held him back, he joked, "I went to see a couple of doctors, and they were like, 'You can try this cream. We don't really have a solution. But you're white, it's probably fine.' Which is what people have said to white people their whole life: 'You're white, you're probably fine'."

Jon previously told GQ that he was baffled to find the condition developing on his body just as he landed his breakout role.

He told the magazine in 2015, "I haven't always had it. It started... Well, it's not from stress, it's an autoimmune situation, but stress is the trigger. It started after I got the part on Mad Men. You know... I just can't think what stress I had in my life at that time."