Jon Hamm Joins Cast of Good Omens

The Emmy- and Golden Globe Award-winning actor Jon Hamm (Mad Men, Baby Driver, Bridesmaids) will be joining the cast of Good Omens, in the role of the archangel Gabriel, the primary messenger of God.

The six-part TV adaptation of the best-selling novel by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett comes from BBC Studios. It is currently in production and will be launched by Amazon Prime Video in 2019 and shown at a later date on BBC Two.

Hamm commented: “I read Good Omens almost 20 years ago. I thought it was one of the funniest, coolest books I’d ever read. It was also, obviously, unfilmable. Two months ago Neil sent me the scripts, and I knew I had to be in it.”

The character of Gabriel has a fleeting role in the original novel but showrunner Gaiman explained why he is being developed in the screenplay: “Once we had finished writing Good Omens, back in the dawn of prehistory, Terry Pratchett and I started plotting a sequel. There would have been a lot of angels in the sequel. When Good Omens was first published and was snapped up for the first time by Hollywood, Terry 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.

“The leader of these angels is Gabriel. He is everything that Aziraphale isn’t: he’s tall, good-looking, charismatic and impeccably dressed. We were fortunate that Jon Hamm was available, given that he is already all of these things without even having to act. We were even more fortunate that he’s a fan of the books and a remarkable actor.”