Jon Hamm on Turning the American Dream Into a Nightmare in ‘Your Friends & Neighbors’

Sometimes, there is no telling how far one is willing to go to keep up appearance. In the gritty and glamorous crime drama Your Friends & Neighbors, a sacked hedge fund manager stands at a crossroads, teetering between facing the facts and fortifying the facade. The recently divorced and destitute Andrew ‘Coop’ Cooper has little interest in doing the right thing, choosing instead to steal from his neighbours’ homes in the exclusive enclave of Westmont Village.

From a handful of bills to high-end timepieces, Coop steadily finesses his way around the closely guarded community, creating a workaround for what is thought to be a stopgap solution. But it isn’t long before he finds himself ensnared in a trap of his own making. When his carefully laid plans go awry, he is forced into a dangerous game of cat and mouse, soon discovering that those fortress-like facades protect something far more valuable than material wealth: secrets.

Emmy winner Jon Hamm delivers a searing performance as a man at the end of his rope, getting more than what he bargains for as he sees his close-knit neighbourhood come undone. Your Friends & Neighbors marks Hamm’s return to a leading role on television after his incredible run on Mad Men. BURO Malaysia sat down with the actor and talked about his latest outing—the process behind the making of Andrew Cooper, the things he had stolen in the past, and… Tom Cruise.

It has been a while since you last led a television project. How does it feel this time?

What made me choose the project was meeting with the creator of the show Jonathan Tropper and finding that we both thought this was a good idea for a show. We thought this could be very entertaining and something that we could sink our teeth into—him on the writing side and me on the acting side. We thought it’d be fun—and it was.

I was in my thirties and early forties when I did Mad Men, and now that I’m in my early fifties, it’s a little bit more of a challenge from energy, time management, and life aspects. But I’m still in pretty good shape, so I’m able to carry the load and I know what it takes to do it. I have been through it before, I understand the demands of the job, and I still enjoy it. I have fun every day I go to work, so I’m glad that I get to do it all over again for season two.

Your character Coop has a set idea of what being successful means. Do you share his opinion?

Well, I think part of it is being happy, right? Understanding that happiness isn’t measured by just the things that you have in your life. The material goods. There’s more to life than just an accumulation of a giant pile of stuff. There’s also emotional satisfaction, spiritual gratification, and all of the other things that come with living a life that feeds you and that feels satisfying in some way. So I think that is the journey that Coop is on at this point.

You’re right to point out that he sort of prescribes, as we see in the opening voiceover, this journey that he thought was going to be the thing that was going to get him to the pinnacle of happiness. But it didn’t; it was not that. So reexamining and redefining that, and then beginning again, is part of it. But then there is the added demand that he feels like he has to engage in just to make ends meet and keep up appearances that he knows are ultimately not fulfilling. That is the conundrum he finds himself in.

Can you share with us the thought process of creating the fictional Westmont Village?

It’s based on quite a few places that both Jonathan and I have known either in growing up or in our adult lives. There’s always a fancy part of town in every town. Whether it’s Beverly Hills or Bel Air, Westchester County or the Hamptons, or in my growing up, there was Ladue and Clayton. This is a version of those that we chose to highlight in our fictional part of Upstate New York. It’s interesting because we’re going to these real communities to shoot this fictional show and a lot of people are very pleased that we chose their community to base our not so complimentary version of it.

But you can always tell what the nice part of town is. It’s always clean, it has functioning services, streets without potholes, well-manicured lawns, trees and shrubs, and things like that. That is usually an outward representation of the pride of the community that people have in those places and the amount of money that it takes to live in those places. So we kind of say, “Yes, these places are very nice, but sometimes when you scratch the surface and look a little deeper, there’s a dark side of it too”.

Can you talk about Coop’s affinity for movies? There seem to be some shoutouts to films like Sunset Boulevard in the show.

Good catch. There is a little bit of a nod to Sunset Boulevard, for sure. Coop likes movies, I think that’s a big part of it. Jonathan and I thought that it would be kind of a touchstone for Coop who would go back to the thing that was, at some point in his life, an inspiration to achieve, when his life starts to fall apart. I think a lot of us look at cinema in that way.

Certainly for me, growing up in the Midwest, watching movies like James Bond, Top Gun, Indiana Jones, and Star Wars was very inspirational to me. I looked at them like, “Maybe someday I could go to those places” or “I could do those things” or “I could be in movies”. So I think that that’s the draw for Coop in looking back at these movies. And they’re not all high-brow, Criterion movies necessarily. They are movies that, for whatever reason, sparked some kind of inspiration in him. I think that that’s what he’s going back to when he’s got nothing else going on.

Given the premise of the show, what’s the most expensive thing you’ve ‘stolen’ from a set?

Well, I’ve never really stolen anything from a set. I’ve been gifted some things from a set. The coolest thing I was gifted, which I have in my home, was probably Don Draper’s beautiful chair that was in his apartment at the end of Mad Men. I mean, I have certainly stolen things in my life when I was younger and foolish, but I try not to steal things anymore. The pleasure you get from getting something does not outweigh the psychic cost of that. I think that is something Coop understands too.

But if you’re guaranteed to not get caught, that you will not be penalised, which celebrity friend of yours would you steal from?

Oh boy. Probably the richest, most successful person I know—Tom Cruise. Although, he would probably catch me. He’s good at everything. He would somehow find a way to outfox me. But no, I don’t want to steal anything from anybody. Stealing is bad. I want to go on the record with that, but if I had to, it would probably be Tom Cruise.

As you gear up for season two, is there anything you are not looking forward to doing again?

My knees and my back do not love running, and I do a lot of it in this show. I don’t like to do a lot of it, but I’ll do it. Look, I hate to keep bringing up Tom Cruise, but boy, when I see how fit he is, and he’s about 10 years older than me, I’m just impressed with how he’s been able to stay at that level of physical performance. The physical stuff gets a lot harder. The mental stuff, I fortunately haven’t lost a step in that arena just yet. But my knees, my back, and my hips don’t love sprinting. So hopefully next season, there’s less of that.

Jonathan did say he felt bad for you and was surprised by your dedication to your craft.

Well, it’s always nice to hear that from somebody. I really enjoy my job. I get asked to work with people at the top of their game, I do it at a very high level, and I get compensated at a very high level. Somebody once said success is getting to do the thing that you love. That, and finding someone foolish enough to pay you to do it. I think there’s something to that.

I mean, I am very tired at the end of the day. It takes a tremendous amount of mental acuity, preparedness, emotional energy, and all of those things. But I do love it. So it kind of balances out in the end. So when Jonathan said something like that, I can honestly say, “Yeah, this is why you hired me”. This is the fun part of it for me; to bring his words to life and hopefully make some people feel something when they see it all put together.

‘Your Friends & Neighbors’ premieres on 11 April 2025 on Apple TV+. For more culture reads, click here.