Jon Hamm has finally been given the role he looked like he was already playing every day of his life. The much-anticipated television adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s novel Good Omens has cast Hamm as the Archangel Gabriel, messenger of God.
Good Omens will premiere on Amazon Prime in 2019, and has already cast David Tennant and Michael Sheen as Crowley the demon and Aziraphale the angel, respectively. The novel, which is a comedy about Armageddon, doesn’t give Gabriel much of a part, but Gaiman says they’ve expanded on the role of angels for the miniseries. From the press release:
“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 thirty years later, I started writing Good Omens for TV, one thing I knew was that our angels would have to be in there.”
Gaiman goes on to say that the contrast between Aziraphale and Gabriel is sharp, as Gabriel is everything an angel is supposed to be, everything Aziraphale isn’t: “tall, good-looking, charismatic and impeccably dressed.”
Hamm expressed his enthusiasm for the project in a statement: “I read Good Omens almost twenty 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.”
Fans have been waiting for an adaptation of the novel for decades, and the casting choices have been nothing but good news so far. See the first photos from the set here, and stay tuned for more Good Omens.