Why Jon Hamm refused to star in ‘The Green Lantern’: “That was one I definitely didn’t want to do”
Jon Hamm has made a career out of playing handsome rogues, and he added another one to the list last year with Apple TV’s Your Friends and Neighbours, a dark comedy in which Hamm is a fallen hedge fund manager having to turn to crime to keep him in the lifestyle he’s become accustomed to.
Season one got pretty favourable reviews and a second helping will arrive in April this year, the show marking Hamm’s first major leading role since the one that made him famous, the global smash that was Mad Men.
One of the most successful TV series of this century, Mad Men, put Hamm on the map in a big way after a decade or so spent taking smaller roles in films like Clint Eastwood’s Space Cowboys and We Were Soldiers with Mel Gibson.
Mad Men was one of the original binge-watch shows, and Hamm was impeccable as Don Draper, the charismatic New York ad exec who charmed almost all he encountered over a seven-season run that pulled in 16 Emmys and five Golden Globes, including two for Hamm as ‘Best Actor’.
Such was his success that Hamm began to move toward the top of Hollywood’s casting list, and he began to appear in more movies once the show started to come to an end, picking up parts in The A-Team, Bridesmaids, Edgar Wright’s stylish heist movie Baby Driver and the Jeremy Renner bro-comedy Tag.
But four years after Mad Men began, Hamm flatly turned down a role in a Ryan Reynolds comic book movie that became a notorious flop at the box office. Speaking about neatly side-stepping 2011’s The Green Lantern while aiming for the top of the superhero movie tree, Hamm said: “That was one I definitely didn’t want to do. But I’ve pitched myself for a couple parts of the Marvel universe, I don’t want to say what exactly, but it was a part of a comic book that I really liked. I was like, ‘Are you going to do this story?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, we’re actually thinking of that.’ I go, ‘Good. I should be the guy.’ So maybe it’ll work out.”
As yet, despite years of talks, Hamm has yet to appear in a Marvel film, although he did lend his voice to the superb Transformers One in 2024. As for The Green Lantern, that has the dubious honour of going down as one of the worst comic book adaptations in history, although for Reynolds, it was at least the film on which he met his future wife, Blake Lively. There is now a James Gunn reboot on the way.
It was panned by critics on release and struggled to make back a colossal $200million budget. Hamm, meanwhile, went on to do more major television, including a stint on 30 Rock, a memorable turn in the Black Mirror special ‘White Christmas’ and then parts on both Fargo and Landman in 2024.
Aside from appearing in more of Your Friends and Neighbours, Hamm will be starring in a film called Wilder & Me with Stranger Things’ Maya Hawke about a young musician in 1977 who begins working with the legendary writer and director Billy Wilder, responsible for such landmark movies as Some Like it Hot, The Apartment and Sunset Boulevard.
