Filming is underway on the BBC series based on Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s novel Good Omens but they’re still adding impressive names to the cast list.
Jon Hamm has been cast as the Angel Gabriel in the series, which has been written by Gaiman and which stars Michael Sheen, David Tennant, Adria Arjona, Ariyon Bakare, Michael McKean, Ned Dennehy, Jack Whitehall, Nina Sosanya and Miranda Richardson.
Gabriel doesn’t have very much to do in the novel, but Gaiman has decided to expand the role, saying that “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.
The leader of these angels is Gabriel. He is everything that Aziraphale isn’t: he’s tall, good-looking, charismatic and impeccably dressed. We were fortunate that Jon Hamm was available, given that he is already all of these things without even having to act. We were even more fortunate that he’s a fan of the books and a remarkable actor.”
As it turns out, Hamm was already a fan. He said that “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.”
We’re still a long way off from actually seeing the show but we absolutely cannot wait.
Good Omens will air in 2019 on BBC Two in the UK and on Amazon in other territories. Keep up with the latest genre news with the new issue of SciFiNow.