Jon Hamm Teases ‘Your Friends & Neighbors’ Season 2

Your Friends & Neighbors creator Jonathan Tropper envisioned the overall show as a satire of a midlife crisis, when those who have everything they ever wanted start to panic about whether they actually want something, anything else. Marriages crumble. Careers implode. Most don’t resort to breaking and entering, but that’s part of the debauched thrill of the series.

“Season 2 is beyond that. It’s a much deeper exploration of mortality,” says Tropper, who explored similar themes of the clock running down in his novel and screenplay for This Is Where I Leave You and the recent Prime Video battling-brothers movie The Wrecking Crew. “There’s a strong correlation between these feelings of impending mortality and the desperation to right your ship because you don’t have all the time in the world anymore. That’s something that was very much on my mind.”

You could see the Coop/Ashe storyline as a play on the challenges of making new friends as a grown-up. “Part of it is just the playground that the show sets up,” Hamm says. “This neighborhood is very small and if you are part of the neighborhood, then you are part of the friend group whether you want to be or not. That’s a big part of a lot of the conflict in the show, these relationships that are certainly not by choice, but by necessity or by proximity.”

Overall, Hamm says Coop confronts the same existential questions as most people. He just comes up with unusual (and illegal) answers for them. “What the show is trying to say is actually, ‘Wait, is that all there is?’” he says. “That might be a through-line to a lot of the work that I’ve done in my career, if you look at Mad Men as well. I think that’s why people are responding to the show.”

So how would Don Draper build hype for this new chapter of Your Friends & Neighbors? He’d note that people don’t want things: they want the promise of happiness, love, friendship, and reassurance.

Those are all things you can earn, but can’t really steal.

Your Friends and Neighbors season 2 introduces James Marsden’s Owen Ashe, a new player who sees Coop for who he really is.

The Disruptor

You can’t really call Marsden’s character a bad guy. Owen Ashe is more of a rabblerouser, a chaotic variable who has vastly more money than even his wealthiest new neighbors. More charisma, too.

“I don’t see him as a mustache-twirling villain who’s secretly this dark soul who’s trying to just ruin everybody’s life,” Marsden says. The actor has been on a roll lately, playing a deranged version of himself on the hidden camera series Jury Duty, starring opposite Vince Vaughn and Vince Vaughn in the upcoming time-travel action comedy Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, reprising his role as Cyclops in Avengers: Doomsday, and stealing scenes as the flashback president of the apocalypse in Paradise.

Owen Ashe is another strange but vibrant addition to the Marsden character menagerie. “He’s a little bit of a tornado that comes to town and stirs everything up there in Westmont Village, but he’s very likable that way,” Marsden says.

Likable tornado. Got that?

“We don’t ever lose sight of the humor, whether it’s intended or unintended, that the show brings us,” Hamm says. “So it was a tremendous thrill to shoot and super fun.” He and Marsden were both paramours of Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon once upon a time, but they have never been onscreen together before. “Jimmy is such a great guy and I‘ve wanted to work with him forever,” Hamm says. “We missed each other on 30 Rock, but we’ve definitely made up for it on this.”

There are a lot of rumors about the illicit ways Owen Ashe may have earned the fortune that brings him to the high-end cul-de-sacs of Your Friends & Neighbors. He works in shipping, but the goods that he moves from Point A to Point B is unclear. Drugs? Weapons? Something worse? Whatever his backstory, there’s a fearlessness about him.

“I actually don’t see him as a sociopath,” Tropper says. “I just see him as a guy who is a much more exaggerated version of what Cooper is. At what point are you allowed to throw stones, right? Coop is a thief. Ashe is breaking the law on a much larger scale, and he is making a lot more money doing it.”

The writer and producer says the two characters aren’t equivalent, though. “The difference is we believe in our hearts that Coop is acting out of desperation, but he does have a moral center. He’s just lost track of it,” Tropper says. “Whereas Ashe has long ago discarded his completely.”

Marsden begs to differ. At least from Ashe’s perspective, he and Coop have a lot in common. “There’s something curious about Coop that Owen is really attracted to,” he says. “Owen does carry around some secrets and maybe he recognizes that in Cooper as well, but Cooper’s also no bullshit. In business and in life, Owen has always been attracted to people where it is very direct, very real, and he can speak to them. Also, these are two single guys. Owen comes in and he really wants to connect with people.”

As Marsden talks about the role, he can’t stop smiling. He has to hold back on some of the more eccentric turns that the character takes, but the actor has no poker face about the ways he makes Hamm’s character twist. “[Coop] is finding himself in this situation where it’s raining and it’s pouring and it’s one thing after another,” Marsden says. “And here’s this dipshit guy coming into town pretending like he’s Gatsby and everyone’s so enamored with him. ‘And he’s got me by the balls.’”

Your Friends & Neighbors sees the return of Amanda Peet’s Mel Cooper, the ex-wife of Coop who sure seems like his current wife a lot of the time.

The Seductress

What’s the opposite of a femme fatale? Not a lethal woman who leads the hero down a dark and destructive path, but one who might save him if only he recognized how much she cares about him. A femme loyale.

That’s one way of thinking about Amanda Peet’s Mel Cooper, the ex-wife of Coop who sure seems like his current wife a lot of the time. When he finds himself in times of trouble, Mother Mel comes to him, speaking words of wisdom more often than not. They also have unrequited sparks as season 2 opens. Viewers might be wondering if they’re already back together—but no. Not yet, anyway.

Credit to Tropper and the Your Friends & Neighbors writers for creating passionate will they or won’t they? tension between two divorced people. “Before I signed onto the project, Tropper told me he wanted it to be the emotional through-line of the show, and so that never left my mind,” says Peet. “I’m always sort of looking for ways to convey that and keep that. To make sure that [the relationship] is not dead in the water, and that they’re still crushing on each other.”

This season, Mel finds herself confronting another common change to women at her time of life. Asked about what she personally brought to the character this time around, Peet volunteers: “We have a little bit of a parallel element to our stories because Mel begins to go through the aches and pains of menopause. Yeah. That’s part of it.”

It may not sound like the sexiest topic, but actually Mel is as hungry as someone in the throes of puberty. “I’ve had more sex scenes on this show than I’ve had in my whole career,” Peet says. “I feel, I don’t know … I feel honored.” Then modesty kicks in, and she says: “I don’t know that anyone would want to see that,” before adding with a laugh: “I mean, I know my children won’t.”

“In season 1, Mel was really the rock and Coop was in crisis,” teases series creator Jonathan Tropper. “And in season 2, we really wanted to pull the rug out from under Mel and put her in crisis too,” he says.

After being the responsible mom for so long (we’re talking about the character again here), Mel’s desires can sometimes manifest in awkward ways, just like they can for someone first experiencing those feelings. But Your Friends & Neighbors navigates the comedic parts with affection. Season 2 makes Mel ravishing.

“I mean, for a 54-year-old actress, it’s pretty fun that he’s writing her with this complexity and including her sexual needs. I feel like it doesn’t happen that often,” Peet says. “I like the way Tropper handled that because there’s a lot about menopause in the zeitgeist right now, but it was fun to tackle some of this in a comedic way and also have Mel be kind of struggling with dating and sex.”

Tropper says the ex-couple has more in common than they realize. “Mel is similar to Coop. We’re dealing with mortality, we’re dealing with aging and the sense that we don’t have forever to get this right anymore,” he says. “With Coop, it’s his back and it’s his health and it’s certain other things we won’t reveal yet. And with Mel, it’s perimenopause and it’s aging out of certain things and facing that.”

The two really are together, even if they don’t realize it. “Coop and Mel are on parallel journeys,” Tropper says. “They were supposed to be taking that journey together. It’s very different when you’re taking it alone.”

He saw season 2 as a chance to let Peet run wild. “In season 1, Mel was really the rock and Coop was in crisis. And in season 2, we really wanted to pull the rug out from under Mel and put her in crisis too,” he says. “Mel really starts to spin out. She’s feeling that same thing he’s feeling: I’m running out of time. We see Mel following an arc similar to Coop’s in season 1 in that she’s becoming more desperate. And she’s starting to break the rules.”

The only figure in the community sympathetic to Mel (Olivia Munn) is the newcomer, Owen Ashe (Marsden), who is shaking up the town in every way he can.

The Outcast

Olivia Munn didn’t think she would even be back for season 2. As the first chapter ended, her Sam Levitt was (heads-up, this is a spoiler for season 1) exposed for framing Coop for murder in a ploy to hide her ex-husband’s suicide and collect $20 million in insurance. That’s not exactly a misdemeanor.

“I only signed on for one season,” Munn says. “And halfway through, Jonathan Tropper asked me to lunch and he was like, ‘Will you stay on more?’ I already knew how this first season was going to end, so I was like, ‘How am I going to stay? Are you changing the ending?’ And he was like, ‘Really wealthy people have really good lawyers and they get out of a lot of stuff.’ I was like, ‘That is true.’”

And so, Sam evades serious prison time. The court of public opinion in Westmont Village, however, isn’t as merciful. She is still living there, but she is a social exile now.

“What I really loved was how it takes a real look at people who have everything that we think makes a happy life and what happens when you lose it all,” Munn says. “What are the lengths that you’ll go to maintain that power and wealth?”

Shunned, broke and alone, she must sell her home and scramble to maintain some semblance of her old life. She’s doing it for her children, but also for herself. But expect an awakening in Sam during season 2.

The status she once craved starts to lose its allure. “You realize that it actually doesn’t make you happy,” the actress says. “But you don’t realize that until you start to lose some of the pieces. Your marriage falls apart, and you lose your job, and then you kind of realize, Wow, I’ve been living a little bit of a hollow life. But it doesn’t really feel hollow until you’re outside and you’re screaming back in—and you can hear that echo.”

Despite his nightly heists, Hamm says Coop confronts the same existential questions as most people. “What the show is trying to say is actually, ‘Wait, is that all there is?’” he says.

Coop is content to see the ex-lover who tried to set him up for murder get what’s coming to her. And Mel still resents her for sleeping with her husband and breaking up the marriage (although clearly they had other problems beyond her.) The only figure in the community sympathetic to Mel is the newcomer, who is shaking up the town in every way he can.

“I’m not sure he’s calculating with her,” Marsden says. “I think he’s fascinated that she has a criminal record. To anybody else, they would just be like: stay away. And he’s kind of like, ‘That makes you interesting. What is it about you? Tell me this story.’”

Mel is happy to count this outlandish outsider as an ally. “If I was to ever do what my character did and nobody wanted me around, and nobody liked me, and it was all of my fault, there would be no way I would be so insistent on getting back in,” Munn says. “I’d be like, ‘There are so many neighborhoods in this world and more people to be friends with—people who don’t know that I set someone up for murder.’”

But Munn is not wired like her character. “My character, and a lot of the people in the show, find their self-worth and their identity by being accepted into that world and by having that money,” she says. “So for Sam, she’s like, ‘I’m going to figure out a way in.’ There’s so much energy behind that. And that energy could be much more useful in other places, but for her, it’s tunnel vision.”

That’s the cathartic theme of Your Friends & Neighbors, one that connects the first season with the second, and will likely continue on into the future. It’s a cautionary tale, but one with a dark sense of humor. “The overriding tone of the show is escapist, playing with this idea of this overprivileged, incredibly rich people behaving badly,” Hamm says, “which we seem to be stuck with in the 21st century America of now.”