Jon Hamm

In Your Friends & Neighbors (2025), Jon Hamm plays a disgraced hedge fund manager who takes up burglary without abandoning his expectation of respect. Andrew ‘Coop’ Cooper is still a man who thinks his difficulties deserve everyone’s attention. We laughed at the burglaries because Hamm makes that dignity look ridiculous while keeping us hoping he gets away with it. His self-pity is funny, and Hamm never insists we find it noble.

The breakthrough was Don Draper, the advertising executive in Mad Men (2007–2015). Brooding roles followed, and the early concern about typecasting was understandable. Supporting film parts, voice work and comedy gave him more to do with that assurance. The sardonic lead of Confess, Fletch (2022) and the abusive sheriff of Fargo (2023–2024) put his confidence to different uses. The comedies interest us because they let him look foolish without becoming any less convincing.

The voice work makes particularly economical use of him. As Sentinel Prime in Josh Cooley’s Transformers One (2024), he supplies a salesman’s warmth; as Mayor Jerry Generazzo in Hoppers (2026), he sounds comfortably accustomed to getting his way. The pleasure is in hearing how little effort he needs to suggest someone pleased with his own standing. These are useful supporting turns in films whose pleasures are spread across their casts.

Nor does putting him in an ensemble guarantee that the film will find enough for him to do. In Steven Soderbergh’s No Sudden Move (2021), his detective is one more person to accommodate as the explanations multiply. Soderbergh also edits, but cannot keep those competing interests from crowding out the two hired men who made the opening hour work. The film leaves us wishing for fewer explanations, whoever is delivering them.

Your Friends & Neighbors gives him space, sometimes more than the writing earns. Jonathan Tropper’s observations about wealthy unhappiness are familiar, and the narration explains what Hamm has already made readable. The editing team, including Andy Keir and Tatiana S. Riegel, does its most satisfying work when the crime plot gets moving. We want more of the stealing and less explanation of why a rich man feels hard done by. Start there for Hamm’s comedy, with modest expectations of what the programme has to say about money.