Home TV News Jon Hamm Joins The Cast Of BBC/Amazon’s ‘Good Omens’

Jon Hamm Joins The Cast Of BBC/Amazon’s ‘Good Omens’

by Dave Elliott
Jon Hamm Joins The Cast Of BBC/Amazon's 'Good Omens'

Jon Hamm Joins The Cast Of BBC/Amazon’s ‘Good Omens’

The BBC & Amazon have added another star to its already glittering array of talent for their adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens it has been announced today.

Emmy and Golden Globe award-winning actor, and star of ‘Mad Men’, Jon Hamm, will be joining the cast as the archangel Gabriel – the primary messenger of God.

“I read Good Omens almost twenty years ago,” comments Hamm. “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.”

For those of you unfamiliar with the book, it tells the story of the prophesied apocalypse, which will see the world come to an end next Saturday. The armies of Good and Evil are amassing, tempers are flaring, and everything appears to be going according to Divine Plan. Except for Aziraphale (Michael Sheen), a somewhat fussy angel, and Crowley (David Tennant), a fast-living demon. Both have lived among Earth’s mortals since The Beginning, are rather fond of the lifestyles, and neither are looking forward to the coming war… Oh, and someone also seems to have misplaced the Antichrist…

Whilst the role of Gabriel in the book is somewhat of a cameo, Gaiman, who is writing the screenplay, has expanded the part played by the celestial beings for the tv series. “Once we had finished writing ‘Good Omens’, back in the dawn of prehistory, Terry Pratchett and I started plotting a sequel,” says Gaiman. “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 thirty 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.”

Along with Sheen & Tennant, Hamm will join the other previously announced cast members including Adria Arjona (Anathema Device), Nina Sosanya (Sister Mary Loquacious), Jack Whitehall (Newt), Michael McKean (Shadwell), Miranda Richardson (Madame Tracy), Ned Dennehy (Hastur) and Ariyon Bakare (Ligur).

The series will be brought to the screen by the highly acclaimed director/executive producer Douglas Mackinnon, whose credits include ‘Knightfall’, ‘Dirk Gently’, ‘Doctor Who’, ‘Outlander’ and the standalone Victorian episode of ‘Sherlock: The Abominable Bride’, winner of the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie last year.

Good Omens is a co-production between Amazon and the BBC, so will air in 2019 worldwide (including the UK) on Amazon Prime Video first, then come to BBC Two later.

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