I'm judicious with how I spend my time: Jon Hamm on post 'Mad Men' career

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Press Trust of India New Delhi
Last Updated : Jun 03 2019 | 4:40 PM IST

For eight years, he played the suave yet troubled adman Donald Draper in "Mad Men" but since its 2015 finale, actor Jon Hamm has stayed away from making a long-term commitment to the small screen.

The actor, who has had sporadic and mostly light-hearted appearances in shows such as "Saturday Night Live", "30 Rock" and "Parks and Recreation", said he is yet to find something to which he is willing to devote years of his life again.

"I haven't really found something that I want to do (in TV for a long term). I'm judicious with how I spend my time. I don't want to spend a year or two, of my life making something that I'm not proud of.

"I'm able to obviously pick and choose at this point in my career. It's a fortunate place to be in," Hamm told PTI in a telephonic interview from London.

"Mad Men", about the rise of advertising in 1960s America, is considered a cult classic and earned the actor his first Emmy and Golden Globe.

Hamm said he gravitated towards Amazon Prime Video's "Good Omens" because of author Neil Gaiman even though his role was different from how it was imagined in the book on which the show is based.

"The only thing that I can go by, is that would I want to watch this? So those are the things that I tend to gravitate towards. That's why when something like this comes along, I jump at the chance," he said.

The show is based on 1990 fantasy novel "Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch", written by Terry Pratchett and Gaiman, who also serves as creator and executive producer.

The actor plays a prim and proper and a little ditzy Archangel Gabriel, to whom Michael Sheen's Aziraphael, an angel on earth duty reports.

Hamm said he had known Gaiman socially and told him how much he appreciated his writings, having read the novel years ago.

"The part he offered me was one that didn't really exist in the books."
"Neil really has a good time playing around with what originally were the sort of the original superheroes as you know, the gods, angels and demons were back in the old days. We just turned them into guys wearing tights and capes and they had supernatural presence and power. I think the series does a really good job at exploiting that and making it interesting from a dramatic standpoint."

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First Published: Jun 03 2019 | 4:40 PM IST

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