Between Mad Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, no one can down (fake) whiskey like Jon Hamm.
(The “scotch” in Your Friends & Neighbors is actually iced tea or water with caramel food coloring, depending on the actor drinking it.)
Though his Apple TV character Andrew Cooper prefers to drink aged scotch, Hamm — and Coop, for that matter — wouldn’t want to go all the way back to the stuff they drank midday at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. The 1960s may have been groovy (though, again, not really at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce), but the liquor was shit.
“Don Draper drank Canadian Club, which is sort of a bargain-basement blended rye,” Hamm’s told The Hollywood Reporter during our conversation that was ostensibly about Your Friends & Neighbors season two. “Coop drinks Macallan 25, which is like $5,000 a bottle. I’ve had both of them — Macallan is much better.”
Same, except I’m pretty sure I’m personally topped out at Macallan 18. Feel free to send a 25-year-old (bottle), Apple — you’ve got the money. (With a market cap of roughly $3.7 billion, Apple makes Amazon look like a Small Business Saturday retailer.)
Macallan, a proper scotch as it is, you know, from Scotland, dates way back to the 1820s. The expensive and sought-after aged, single malt varieties were not introduced until the 1980s.
“Single malt was not popular in the ’60s,” Hamm said, nailing his booze history. The blends were popular — J&B and Johnny Walker, all the blended whiskeys were the big deal.”
These days, blended whiskeys could sure use some good PR — or maybe a full-on rebrand. And who would better do that than Draper Hamm? One of the greatest advertising crossovers of all time was Mercedes-Benz signing Hamm as its spokesperson midway into Mad Men‘s run. Madison Avenue’s best (fake) ad man adapted his pitch — or at least brought the same voice — for the Carousel to the luxury car manufacturer’s TV and radio commercials.
The 15-year (2010-2025) partnership helped uniquely prepare Hamm for Coop’s voiceover explainers of the items stolen from, well, his friends and neighbors. (Lucy Liu is now the voice of Mercedes-Benz.)
“It didn’t hurt! I’ll say that,” Hamm said. “I very much loved doing it… I outlived quite a few CEOs and CMOs — it was a great, great run.”
“It does help,” he continued. “You definitely get the sense of what the rhythm sounds like. You have a very confident ability and belief in your own voice and what it sounds like. The first couple of times people do anything like that, when they hear themselves on tape, they just think, ‘I don’t sound like that.’ I know what I sound like, and I like the way I sound.”
So does Your Friends & Neighbors showrunner Jonathan Tropper, who conceptualized and installed the device for the show. Hamm says it works because “it gives a sense of it being a pitch, but an ironic sense.”
Hamm’s tagline during his Mercedes-Benz tenure was “The Best or Nothing,” which he calls a “fantastic” button. Through Tropper, his Apple TV character is… not making the best decisions, and is in real danger of ending up with nothing.
As good a writer as Tropper is — and as good a lead actor as he has — it is not easy over the course of a series (season three is underway) to continuously justifying Coop repeatedly choosing risky home invasions and burglaries over a return to hedge fund management. In season two, Coop gets back into the legitimate-thievery game and in a big way, but he inevitably reverts to a life of crime.
It is an easy decision for Tropper to make, given the entire plot of this world he created, but it is getting hard for Coop to justify. So we asked Hamm to speak for his character’s choice.
“Like we as human beings, characters often make the wrong choice,” Hamm said. “Or poor choices, because of, [shrugs], reasons.”
“The idea of going back to [the job that] actively fucked him out of a life and set him down this path to where he almost ended up in jail for the rest of his life was, I think, pretty loathsome to him,” Hamm continued. “The idea of turning to a life of crime that’s marginally sustainable, if not unsustainable, was favorable to that. So there’s something to be said for that. Obviously, we as the omniscient viewer know that this is not going to end well.”
Confess Fletch, Jon Hamm, 2022.
Paramount Global/Courtesy Everett Collection
Away from Apple TV — from any TV, actually — is a separate Hamm vehicle that started well and has probably ended prematurely.
Confess, Fletch is a very good 2022 movie that really could have gone the way of, well, Fletch Lives, the 1989 sequel to the classic Fletch (1985). Confess, Fletch is actually the sequel novel (to the original Fletch) in the Gregory McDonald 11-book series; Fletch Lives was an original screenplay by Leon Capetanos (and that’s probably where it went wrong).
The last time I spoke with Hamm, I cornered him to talk more Fletch (and not Grimsburg, much to the chagrimsburg of Fox, which was throwing the party). At the time, the problem was Harvey Weinstein’s bullshit, as Miramax owned the rights. Well, not much has changed there, but now you can add David Ellison’s (much different, to be fair) bullshit to the pile.
“Unfortunately, that gets into a difficulty with rights and all of this stuff. It was owned by Miramax, and obviously they had some serious issues, and Paramount, which obviously is going through it’s [changes] at the moment,” Hamm told THR last week. “So as much as I loved it and I would love to make all of those books — I would make Fletches until I die — I think sadly, the IP is existing in kind of a limbo right now.”
Hamm added, “Write your congressman,” which is such a Fletch thing to say, and probably why he is the only guy in Hollywood who could pull off the iconic Chevy Chase role. (Jason Sudeikis was once attached to take over the character for an adaptation of Fletch Won, the eighth book in the series, and at different times, Jason Lee, Ben Affleck, Zach Braff and Ryan Reynolds were all expected to don Irwin M. Fletcher’s faded Los Angeles Lakers jersey.)
“I got to meet Chevy Chase, in fact, randomly in an airport lounge,” Hamm said. “He kind of came up behind me and surprised me, and I heard this voice say, ‘I heard you played Fletch.’ It was like, ‘Oh my god!’ And I gave him a big hug, and I told him how much I loved him — it was so great.”
Phew, because not every “I-met-Chevy-Chase” story ends that way.
“Obviously, that movie — those movies — were huge for me. They got me into reading the books, and they got me into understanding that there were so many other stories there,” Hamm said. “Hopefully, at some point, the rights will revert into something else… I hope against hope we’ll get to make another one.”
Hamm is definitely making another Your Friends & Neighbors season — the streaming series was renewed for a third season months ahead of Friday’s season-two premiere.
