Coop of “Your Friends & Neighbours” (debuting Friday on Apple TV Plus) has it all. The fancy job. The giant house. The lovely wife and kids. Money. Lots of it. But then, slowly, he starts to lose them.
His wife leaves him for his friend, his kids tune him out, he starts hemorrhaging cash to alimony, multiple house payments. Then he’s fired — so a fed-up Coop decides to explore new revenue streams: namely, robbing his neighbours’ houses.
Coop is played by TV icon Jon Hamm in his first headlining role on a series since “Mad Men” wrapped a decade ago. The character has some of the same acidic snobbery that powered Draper, but Coop is rawer, angrier, more desperate, a plump rodent willing to chew off its own arm for another bit of cheese.
The premiere opens with Coop getting stuck with a dead body and works backwards from there, detailing just how his blood lust for bucks got him there.
Now that “Severance” is done for the year, could it be the next big Apple TV Plus hit? The streamer already renewed it for a second season before it even aired.
Hamm shared with us how it feels to play a character so unfettered, the scariest part about taking the role and the travails of leading a show the second time around.
Losing his job frees Coop in a way where he feels he has nothing to lose and can say and do whatever he wants, from punching a kid in the dick to his new career path as a robber. How did it feel to play someone with so few inhibitions?
Fun. It’s a fun thing to inhabit that space, briefly. Obviously there are diminishing returns to having no filter. And Coop finds that out pretty quickly. People rightly start calling him what he is, which is kind of an asshole. He’s not his best self when he’s doing that, but he’s operating out of a place of frustration and great discomfort for having his life completely upended.
So many of us feel like we’re teetering on the edge of financial collapse these days. Why does this show feel so relevant in terms of people’s situations?
I think the constant pursuit of more really puts everybody in a place where they feel like they’re always behind. When the concept of enough is nonexistent, or the constant exposure to someone or something that is always ahead of you, it becomes like the donkey with the carrot on a stick; you have to keep going. And that’s the dark side of what used to be called the American Dream, is that there’s no end point. Or the end point needs to be established by the person pursuing. You can say to yourself, “I’m good.” And if you mean it, then you’ll probably be pretty happy with what you have.
That’s really the central conundrum of the show. Coop says at the beginning: “I did all of these things right, I got me this one that got me this one that got me this thing that got me this thing and then, at the end of the day, I realized I hadn’t really been tending my own garden in any real way. Just this pursuit of more and it all went away. And now what?” And I think a lot of people can really identify with that.
You and Coop have some similarities in that Coop reached some of the highest echelons of business and you played one of television’s most iconic characters. And now this is one of your first post-“Mad Men” forays into a show all about you and based around you. So you’re both facing big changes. What was scary about that for you in taking on this role?
Especially now in the current landscape of television, obviously nothing is guaranteed. And we’re not even sure what people’s viewing habits are. Everything is weirdly undefined, while also being wildly overexposed and crowded. So there’s some trepidation in the sense of trying to guess what people want. And then, there’s no formula. Anybody that says they have the formula usually finds themselves out of a job within a year because they’re inevitably wrong.
It was a little bit scary, but I’ve only ever done the thing that I’ve always done in choosing projects (which) is, “Would I want to watch this. Is this entertaining to me? Does this mean something? Is it compelling in any way to get me to pick this out of the incredibly dense landscape of choices that we have?” And I said, “Yeah, I would watch this show.” So you never know what’s going to be the next big thing. I don’t think anybody saw “Baby Reindeer” coming out of anywhere, or “Adolescence,” or even “White Lotus” in many ways.
What is the show doing that no one else is? Was there a scene in the script when you got it that really jumped out at you?
The pilot sets up a world where we have a lot of things going on that look like they’re not going to be sustainable. I think that’s a very compelling way to set up the first show of a series. Here’s a guy that is going down a road that does not look like it’s going to end well. Even removing the dead body at the beginning of it, just the idea of trying to sustain what seems to be unsustainable, I think is a compelling way to begin a series of television. How is he gonna do this? And then the joy is in the journey, not necessarily the destination. The journey is quite fun.
What was the hardest part of the show for you? Was there anything that really stretched you as an actor?
Mostly, it was difficult from a time-management standpoint. Being the lead of a show, an hour-long drama especially, and the scheduling and time constraints in your mid-50s is a lot more difficult than it was in my mid-30s, just from an energy standpoint. But I’m still fit and I’m probably in the best shape I’ve really ever been in my life. But I did have times where I was like, “Man, I’m tired, I’m really tired.” But also, part of it is when you get to do what I get to do, which I happen to love what I do, that alleviates a lot of that difficulty.
And if you could steal anything, what would you steal?
I certainly had my moments when I was young where I would take things that were not mine, and to this day I’m not happy or proud of that. But I don’t think I would steal anything. There’s nothing I need.
