The Your Friends and Neighbors cul de sac of collaborators — including cast and creator — gathered Friday at the Directors Guild of America for a Deadline and Apple TV+ FYC Event that kicked off the Contenders TV weekend to discuss the creation of the series and how each individual connected with their character and the broader premise of the show.
Creator Jonathan Tropper, executive producer and stars Jon Hamm, Amanda Peet, Olivia Munn, Mark Tallman, Aimee Carrero, Hoon Lee, Lena Hall, Isabel Gravitt and Donovan Colan unpacked the early makings of the series, which premieres April 11 on the streamer in a preview night panel discussion moderated by Deadline’s own Antonia Blyth. Tropper and Hamm spoke to injecting Hamm’s character’s voiceover with noir elements and new life, and the ensemble opened up about their approach to their specific characters in the show’s first season. Before it even premieres, it has been renewed for a Season 2.
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You can watch the conversation here:
Hamm stars as Andrew “Coop” Cooper, a hedge fund manager fired in disgrace after working hard to afford an expensive lifestyle that also was upended by his wife (Peet) cheating on him with his best friend (Tallman). The crisis events culminate in Coop deciding to steal from his extremely wealthy neighbors in Westmont Village, which leads him to discover that they might be putting up facades that could crumble like his did.
Tropper spoke to multiple attempts at trying to get the story down in “different iterations” — one of which was a novel format — and of the challenge of zeroing in on star and EP Hamm as the embodiment of Coop.
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“I never really sat down to write it,” the creator said. “I started writing it as a novel once, got about 100 pages in, and I don’t know, got busy and didn’t do it. And once the show crystallized for me, the problem was it was a very specific character to me. And looking out at the landscape, the only actor I saw that I felt could really do it in a way that I thought would be true to what I was trying to do, was Jon [Hamm]. The problem was I didn’t know him, so I got my agent to set up a lunch — in retrospect, it was kind of a ballsy move, but I just said, ‘Let’s do a lunch.’ I pitched him the idea, and once I saw his interest in the idea, I went home to write the pilot. At that point, you know, he became that voice in my head. That was the character.”
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Hamm interjected “correct” to both aforementioned problems presented by Tropper.
“We sparked together when we when we sat down and met, and it wasn’t that long for [him] to turn around and get that script to me, which, when I read it, I thought, ‘Well, this is great. Let’s shoot this,’” the Emmy-winning Mad Men alum said. “And I had made a commercial telling Apple how much I really wanted to work there, and that really bore fruit. So, yeah, it all seemed to work out pretty well.”
Amanda Peet, Jon Hamm, Olivia Munn at the Deadline Contenders TV Opening Night Presents “Your Friends & Neighbors” screening and panel held at the Directors Guild of America on April 04, 2025 in Los Angeles, California
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Amanda Peet, Olivia Munn
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Antonia Blyth, Jonathan Tropper, Lena Hall, Jon Hamm, Aimee Carrero, Amanda Peet, Isabel Gravitt, Olivia Munn, Donovan Colan, Hoon Lee, andMark Tallman
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Antonia Blyth, Jonathan Tropper, Lena Hall, Jon Hamm, andAimee Carrero
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Jonathan Tropper, Lena Hall, Jon Hamm, Aimee Carrero, Amanda Peet, and Isabel Gravitt
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Jonathan Tropper
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Amanda Peet and Olivia Munn
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Jonathan Tropper, Lena Hall, Jon Hamm, Aimee Carrero
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Hoon Lee, Mark Tallman
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Olivia Munn, Donovan Colan, Hoon Lee
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Coop’s voiceover, which introduces the show from the opening scene, was a collaboration between Tropper and Hamm, who came at the element from different angles.
“My goal was to bring in a voiceover that was inspired by the film noir of the ’60s, Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, that kind of thing. I thought it would be a funny juxtaposition in this very contemporary world,” Tropper said. “The important thing to me was that it never be a crutch and it never be something that fills up plot holes but is more adding texture and also a different dimension to the character — in that the person you’re seeing on the screen is going through a very different emotional experience than the person who’s telling you what he’s telling you in the voiceover.”
After Tropper or the writers put together the voiceover dialogue, Hamm comes in to make it his own.
“A brilliant way to kind of provide this — the way we tell the story, as you’ve seen, you know, that starts with a very, you know, sort of arresting image of a dead body covered in blood and that whole scenario, and then goes back, so the narrator, as Jonathan says, is an omniscient narrator looking back on this thing while this person is living through these things, that he knows how they end,” Hamm added. “In fact, that was a big conversation. We probably recorded two or three versions of this voiceover track, and we were playing with tenses. And should it be that he knew or that he knows, or this is what you know, or this is what you knew? And we went back and forth on it, and I think we landed on the right place, but it was very on purpose.”
Gravitt and Colan spoke to the family dynamic they created on set with onscreen parents Hamm and Peet, and Hamm stressed the authenticity of the bond they formed. Munn spoke to her character, who “is the only one who hasn’t come from a wealthy background.”
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“She has a blue-collar upbringing,” Munn said. “She married into this world. We’re meeting her right in this moment where her entire life is crumbling apart and she’s on the precipice of losing everything.”
Lee joked about “carrying Jonathan” for over a decade since they worked on the Warrior series together. Tallman spoke to his former athletic background and how it informed his character. Hall’s and Carrero’s characters aren’t to be counted out of the heist drama either. In fact, Carrero spoke to how Tropper was amenable to her changing her character’s accent.
Season 2 of the drama series, which was announced in tandem with the first look and premiere date of Season 1, will start production three days after Season 1 premieres, according to Tropper, who teased the next installment generally as in the vein of what The Empire Strikes Back is to Star Wars.
The full conversation can be watched above.
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