Jon Hamm Reacts To His Viral Moment In Your Friends & Neighbours: Calls Meme-Maker An “Evil Genius”

In Hollywood, “nobody knows anything,” as the great screenwriter William Goldman once said.

And for Jon Hamm, he knows jack about memes — even though he’s the star of one that broke the Internet.  

Unless you’ve been off the grid these past few months — with zero access to Wi-Fi and social media (what a life) — you’d have a hard time avoiding some variation of the “Jon Hamm dancing in the club” meme on your For You feed.

Some content creator lifted a clip of Hamm dancing in packed club, almost trancelike, with nary a care in the world — using it to capture moments of pure joy, or as an ode to early 2010s Millennial club culture. (But my personal favourite dance meme is still this one.)

The source of that clip? Hamm’s Apple TV dramedy Your Friends & Neighbours, where he plays Andrew “Coop” Cooper, a hedge-fund hotshot who gets pink-slipped and starts stealing from his affluent friends and neighbours in the fictional New York suburb of Westmont Village to keep up appearances — and to maintain that luxe life for his ex-wife Mel (Amanda Peet) and their two children.  (FYI: the excerpt is from Episode 8’s ‘When Did We Become These People’.)

For Coop, breaking bad was meant to be a temporary fix — but inevitably, it became a way of life… and he’s loving every minute of it.

“Whoever the evil genius was that put the clip of me in the club to some piece of music [most versions use by DJ Kato’s ‘Turn the Lights Off’, replacing the original track ‘Sentient System’ by Joseph William Morgan] that wasn’t in the original show, then, God bless,” Hamm tells 8days.sg and other press over Zoom recently. “It certainly was enduring and people seem to like it.”

He’s also grateful for the free publicity: “I think what happened was it maybe drew more people to come watch the show.”

With Season 2 out this week, is Hamm terrified or excited that it might spawn another meme?

“We’ll find out,” he says. “I think if we’ve learned anything about meme culture, if I can use those two words together, that you can’t manufacture those kind of things. They sort of happen to spring up organically.”

And when it does happen? You just roll with it. Not that Hamm is keeping tabs.

“I don’t exist on social media. It doesn’t have any place in my life,” he says. “So I don’t get it, but I appreciate that people do and people certainly had fun with it and God bless them.”

“Whoever the evil genius was that put the clip of me in the club to some piece of music that wasn’t in the original show, then, God bless.”— Jon Hamm on his viral dancing meme

That said, Hamm, who’s also an executive producer on the show, hopes fans will continue to have fun watching Coop as he tries to clean up the mess of his own doing. A good guy who’s always making morally dubious decisions, Coop finds his double life under threat in Season 2 with the arrival of a new resident — Owen Ashe, a shady billionaire played by James Marsden.

“I think part of television and storytelling is escapism and seeing things that maybe you feel like you wouldn’t necessarily do, but vicariously you can live through,” he adds. “It’s more fun to watch somebody misbehave than it probably is to do it yourself.”

Morally conflicted characters, like Coop, are inherently compelling.  “I think that’s the foundation of drama, or at least good drama,” he says. “If you wanted to watch somebody who’s morally unambiguous, you could maybe go to church.”

They’re also a gift for actors to play. Hamm hopes he gets to stay in the sandbox, long enough to explore a character’s rise, fall and possible redemption, just as he did during the seven-season run as advertising guru Don Draper on Mad Men.

“I think that there’s a comfortability, a freedom, if you want to say, sure, with spending more time with the character and getting more relaxed into the portrayal,” he says. “You certainly get better like you do with everything over time and practice.”

“It’s nice to get the opportunity to do that with Coop and to see how his relationships with not only his family, his children, the mother of his children, his own parents, but also his relationship with this difficult situation and his neighbourhood and the people in that smaller world react to him,” Hamm continues. “So I hope to get to do it for a few more seasons as well.”

Your Friends & Neighbours has already scored an early Season 3 renewal — two months before the new season even premiered.

Which brings us to the inevitable question: Which of Hamm’s characters — Don Draper, tech mogul Paul Marks from The Morning Show, or Mayor Jerry from Hoppers — would make an ideal addition to Westmont Village? And what would Coop steal from them that they wouldn’t notice?

“Paul Marks is wealthy enough probably to live in Coop’s neighbourhood. And Mayor Jerry could probably be the mayor,” he deadpans.

What about Draper?

“I think that Don Draper would most likely be dead by now,” Hamm says matter-of-factly. “That was 60 years ago.”

As for what Coop would fleece from them? “Good Lord, I don’t know. Anything that’s not nailed down, I suppose.”

Your Friends & Neighbours Season 2 is now streaming on Apple TV, with new episodes dropping every Friday.

Photos: Apple TV