BBC Two and Amazon have announced that award-winning actor Jon Hamm (Mad Men, pictured) will be joining the cast of Good Omens in the role of the archangel Gabriel - the primary messenger of God.  The six-part television adaptation by BBC Studios of the best-selling novel by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett is currently in production and will be launched by Amazon Prime Video in 2019, and shown at a later date on BBC Two.

Jon Hamm says: “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”

The character of Gabriel has a fleeting role in the original novel but showrunner Neil Gaiman explains why he is being developed in the screenplay: 

“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.”