Jon Hamm Says He Almost Starred in Ben Affleck’s Gone Girl

Jon Hamm and Ben Affleck shared the screen in The Town, but according to Hamm, he was the first choice to play Affleck’s role in Gone Girl. In an interview on Watch What Happens Live, Hamm said that Affleck wasn’t happy about having to wear a St. Louis Cardinals cap in Gone Girl (Affleck is famously a huge Boston Red Sox fan), and that the Oscar winner may have been spared such an indignity if it wasn’t for Hamm’s Mad Men shooting schedule, which left no room for him to accept the Gone Girl role and forced filmmaker David Fincher to look elsewhere.

Hamm is from St. Louis and, in the clip, seemed pretty tickled by the whole Cardinals/Red Sox aspect of the story. Of course, Hamm himself had to go “out of town” for a cap in last year’s Confess, Fletch, in which he wore a Los Angeles Lakers hat in a nod to Chevy Chase’s 1985 take on the beloved character.

“I was down to the very end of [Gone Girl]. It was meant to be me, but we had to film the continuing adventures of Mr. Draper,” Hamm said.

You can see the full clip in context below.

For a timeline — Mad Men ran from 2007 until 2015, during which time, Hamm did manage to squeeze in some other movie appearances, including 2010’s The Town, directed by Affleck. Gone Girl was released in 2014.

Miramax still has a sequel to Confess, Fletch in early development, with writer/director Greg Mottola currently working on writing a script for Fletch’s Fortune, a book that centers on a murder that takes place at a journalism convention. While Confess, Fletch got great reviews, the box office was less receptive, so it’s difficult to know whether the sequel will actually get made…but it’s a good sign that it’s still at least being written.

Last year, in addition to Fletch, Hamm appeared in Top Gun: Maverick. He was also cast in the upcoming fifth season of Fargo, which reunites him with Legion producer Noah Hawley.

In Gone Girl, former New York-based writer Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) and his glamorous wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) present a portrait of a blissful marriage to the public. However, when Amy goes missing on the couple’s fifth wedding anniversary, Nick becomes the prime suspect in her disappearance. The resulting police pressure and media frenzy cause the Dunnes’ image of a happy union to crumble, leading to tantalizing questions about who Nick and Amy truly are.