“Dear men of America, I like beer, I like football. I’m probably the most interesting girl you’ll ever meet.”

GQ Magazine has a fantastic feature on ‘Mad Men’ star January Jones, who plays Betty Draper, which was conducted during a Chicago – LAX flight. Over beers, the star opens up in a feisty interview about her modeling career, how she got into acting, and how she hates being told no.

Jones, who started out as a model, talks (but doesn’t name) her first boyfriend when she moved to Los Angeles to try acting. “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–fuck you! He only has nice things to say now–if anything, I should thank him. Because the minute you tell me I can’t do something, that’s when I’m most motivated.” The interviewer later writes that the ex was Ashton Kutcher.

At 18, Jones left South Dakota and arrived in New York City to try her hand at modeling. She started dating Julian Steinberg, whose father, Saul, a notorious Wall Street raider, had made billions during the ’70s and ’80s. While dating Steinberg, January became close friends with his mother, Laura, a fireball 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—a wedding in Italy, a month in Bali—even after January had split with her son. “Laura taught me how to hold my knife and fork and to be a lady,” says January. “To keep my forearms on the table—never my elbows—and 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.”

January spent a year in New York, modeling for the likes of Abercrombie, before moving to Paris where she led a lonely existence. During a visit to Paris, Jones had an epiphany at the gravesite of Doors frontman Jim Morrison. “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 – very quickly – decided to go to L.A. and try acting. Without any training.”

“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—this ability to want something, and go for it in an almost childish way.”

On playing Mrs. Draper: “I’d never really played a mom or a wife before and all of a sudden I’m getting all these lonely mom and wife offers. I don’t want to get stuck.”

On how she is nothing like the character she plays: “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!”

“I’m a beer-pong champion! Among my friends, anyway.”