For eight years, he played the suave yet troubled adman Donald Draper in "Mad Men" but since its 2015 finale, actor Jon Hamm has stayed away from making a long-term commitment to the small screen.
The actor, who has had sporadic and mostly light-hearted appearances in shows such as "Saturday Night Live", "30 Rock" and "Parks and Recreation", said he is yet to find something to which he is willing to devote years of his life again.
"I haven't really found something that I want to do (in TV for a long term). I'm judicious with how I spend my time. I don't want to spend a year or two, of my life making something that I'm not proud of.
"I'm able to obviously pick and choose at this point in my career. It's a fortunate place to be in," Hamm told PTI in a telephonic interview from London.
"Mad Men", about the rise of advertising in 1960s America, is considered a cult classic and earned the actor his first Emmy and Golden Globe.
Hamm said he gravitated towards Amazon Prime Video's "Good Omens" because of author Neil Gaiman even though his role was different from how it was imagined in the book on which the show is based.
"The only thing that I can go by, is that would I want to watch this? So those are the things that I tend to gravitate towards. That's why when something like this comes along, I jump at the chance," he said.
The show is based on 1990 fantasy novel "Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch", written by Terry Pratchett and Gaiman, who also serves as creator and executive producer.
The actor plays a prim and proper and a little ditzy Archangel Gabriel, to whom Michael Sheen's Aziraphael, an angel on earth duty reports.
Hamm said he had known Gaiman socially and told him how much he appreciated his writings, having read the novel years ago.
"The part he offered me was one that didn't really exist in the books."
In the novel, the leader of the forces of Heaven was the Metatron, not Gabriel.
"He (Gaiman) said 'trust me, it will be really good'. And I said, 'I'll do it'. I like the source material. I thought with all the people that they're getting attached to this, it's got a chance to be something good...
"Mostly, it's fun, you know, obviously the messiness is where the drama tends to come in. I think Neil and Terry did so well in the book. What Neil was doing so well and adapting this for television is that you have what is sensibly meant to be this sort of celestial personification in Archangel Gabriel and what he really is, is a kind of a dimwit. He's wrong about a lot of stuff because he's so certain of his rectitude. I think that's an interesting juxtaposition," he told PTI.
Hamm said whether it is "American Gods" or "Good Omens" by Gaiman, gods and demons were the original superheroes, who changed shape after creative people put them into "tights and capes".
"Neil really has a good time playing around with what originally were the sort of the original superheroes as you know, the gods, angels and demons were back in the old days. We just turned them into guys wearing tights and capes and they had supernatural presence and power. I think the series does a really good job at exploiting that and making it interesting from a dramatic standpoint."
Next in the pipeline for the actor is films like sci-fi "Lucy in the Sky" with Natalie Portman, drama "The Report", X-Men spin-off "New Mutants" and "Top Gun: Maverick".
Hamm said "The Report" will premiere at Toronto International Film Festival 2019.
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