The Mad Men alum leaped at the chance to feature in the TV adaptation of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s joint novel.
“Tall, good-looking, charismatic and impeccably dressed.” That’s how Neil Gaiman described his and Terry Pratchett’s version of the archangel Gabriel. Invariably, this also applies to Jon Hamm. Variety reports that Hamm will be joining Michael Sheen and David Tennant on Good Omens playing the iconic archangel. Needless to say, this casting feels like a great fit.
Good Omens — a joint venture between Amazon and the BBC — began production last month and is said to feature a laundry list of unique characters (170 of them to be exact…) that will be narratively significant in one way or another. However, with Hamm officially on board, everybody on the cast seems to have a good run for their money. Hamm certainly has a habit of stealing the show whenever he’s onscreen, even if he isn’t the one leading it front and center. He spent the better part of a decade heading the cast of AMC’s Mad Men, and his commanding presence has consistently graced screens big and small since.
The news of Hamm’s Good Omens casting comes in addition to the already wonderful year he’s been having. 2017 has been huge for him at the movies: three features premiered to glowing reviews and two more were picked up by distribution companies (we could be looking at some more releases this year as a result). Critics fawned over both action film Baby Driver and sci-fi drama Marjorie Prime. A.V. Club declared that “for once [Hamm gets] a deserving dramatic film role” in Marjorie Prime; Empire felt Hamm’s antagonistic turn in Baby Driver was “so wonderfully deranged you feel Don Draper spinning in the earth below his feet.”
We can be certain that Good Omens is ready to accommodate the character of Gabriel to match the caliber of Hamm’s onscreen prowess as well. Original “Good Omens” co-author and showrunner Gaiman has expanded Gabriel’s role in the series, telling Variety:
“When ‘Good Omens’ was first published and was snapped up for the first time by Hollywood, Terry [Pratchett] and I took joy in introducing our angels into the plot of a movie that was never made…So when, almost 30 years later, I started writing ‘Good Omens’ for TV, one thing I knew was that our angels would have to be in there.”
For his part, Hamm expresses excitement to dive into the “unfilmable” world of Good Omens, calling the novel “one of the funniest, coolest books I’d ever read.” Gaiman sent him the scripts, and Hamm was all aboard the production with no questions asked. It’s kind of like what he did when he first met Edgar Wright, geeked out and found himself a standout character in one of the most lauded films of 2017. It seems to bode well for everybody when Jon Hamm expresses his fandom (and I’m really trying not to make a ‘good omen’ joke right at this point). We look forward to hearing more exciting news from the Good Omens camp as the series progresses towards its 2019 release.