Jon Hamm has done plenty of voice acting over his career, but voicing 1950s FBI agent-turned-private investigator Jack Bergin has proven unique.
Instead of recording his lines in a silo, Hamm was joined in the recording studio by a murderer’s row of performers — including Alia Shawkat, Ana de la Reguera, Bradley Whitford, Giancarlo Esposito, Omar Epps, Jeanne Tripplehorn and Hamm’s “Mad Men” co-star John Slattery — for the Audible Original series 2022’s “The Big Lie” and the upcoming new installment “The Big Fix.”
“This is better in every way, but mostly because the story is so intimate that it’s super helpful to have the personal connection with the person that you’re acting opposite,” Hamm said, discussing the series, created by John Mankiewicz and directed by Aaron Lipstadt, during Variety & Audible’s Cocktails and Conversations at Sundance. (Watch the full conversation in the video above.) “It’s like being on camera even though it’s not on camera.”
Granted, “The Big Lie” was recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic, so getting two actors together proved “weirdly easier and harder,” Hamm said with a laugh. “Because everybody was available. Wildly, deeply available.”
Count de la Reguera, who plays Lala, an old flame of Jack Bergin’s, among them. “It was the biggest gift ever. My agents called me like, ‘They’re offering you this [role].’ I’m like, ‘Whatever, please, I need to get outta here!’” she said with a laugh. Working in the studio with other actors also made her step up her game. “I was used to recording by myself and if you made a mistake, you’re alone. No one’s judging you. [With this] you have great actors around you, and I was acting the role and acting like ‘I’ve got this.’ Like, ‘I’ve never done this but I’m as cool as these guys are.’”
The decision for the actors to record the scenes together was mandated by series director Lipstadt, who Hamm first worked with more than 20 years ago on Lifetime police drama series “The Division.” Mankiewicz also wrote a few episodes of that series, and the trio reunited for the Audible drama. From the moment Mankiewicz pitched the idea for “The Big Lie” — which follows Hamms’ FBI agent Jack Bergin as he sets out to shut down production of “Salt of the Earth” (a real movie inspired by a New Mexico labor strike) after he becomes convinced that the blacklisted filmmakers are using the film as a recruiting tool for the Communist Party — Audible’s Kate Navin, head of creative development, North America, knew the series had the potential to be a hit.
“His passion for ‘The Big Lie’ meant a lot to me because when a creator comes with that passion, you know they’re going to wanna get it right,” Navin said. “It was an untold story, which had a personal connection to, and it’s a genre that works really well with our audience. So, the vision for it, the passion for it, and of course something that performs well — great combination.”
In fact, they weren’t even finished working on the first installment when Mankiewicz pitched an idea for number two — “The Big Fix” is set in the aftermath of the real-life Chavez Ravine evictions, a dark moment in the history of Los Angeles. “It was a good idea,” Navin added. “That’s the good news. But we probably would’ve said ‘Yes’ either way.”
But that doesn’t mean there weren’t challenges, beginning with the aforementioned pandemic.
“We’d never done [an audio production] before and when we were confronted with this assumption that it’s a pandemic and nobody wants to leave their house, and everybody’s got a booth at home. Everybody knows how to do this, and if they don’t always send ’em a mic and a kit, my jaw kind of dropped,” Lipstadt said. “Because, for me, most of the work of directing is collaborating, and the surprises that you get from collaborating. The idea of saying, ‘OK, we’ll have Jon for four days and he’ll record everything,’ and then everyone else will kind of come in, it was, literally, incomprehensible to me.”
So Lipstadt pushed back and, with COVID-safe protocols in place, the actors got to work. But how did they assemble such an A-list cast for an audio drama?
“The fact is, if you call up someone and say, ‘I’m doing this thing for Audible, Jon Hamm is in it.’ It’s like ‘Check, please,’” Lipstadt said. “People would come in and they spend two hours and it was so much fun.”
“The Big Fix” director Aaron Lipstadt and stars Alia Shawkat, Ana de la Reguera and Jon Hamm pose with Audible’s Kate Navin, Bob Carrigan and Rachel Ghiazza at Variety x Audible Cocktails and Conversations at Sundance.
Christopher Polk
Hamm wouldn’t take all the credit though, mentioning Lipstadt’s own impressive body of work and a “little show called “Miami Vice” in particular. “The greatest list of guest stars in the history of television, because everybody came through that show — from Julia Roberts to Ben Stiller to Frank Zappa,” Hamm said. “Because people wanna be around other people that are doing cool shit. And in the eighties, “Miami Vice” was the coolest of the shit. It’s fun to be a part of something that also feels that way. Like, “Come do this fun thing with us. And you get paid.”
“You get paid?!” Shawkat chimed in, incredulous. Hamm laughed, adding, “Sorry, I got paid.”
All jokes aside, Shawkat joins the second season as both actor and executive producer (like Hamm), taking on the role of roving reporter Aggie Walker.
“She a reporter who’s trying to get the best story but isn’t given the best opportunities. She has a good heart, but she has to be competitive,” Shawkat said, previewing the upcoming storyline. “She reminds me of ‘His Girl Friday,’ a Rosalind Russell-type. She’s sassy and a really fun character.”
Beyond the camaraderie on set and the ability to dress down while recording — de la Reguera mentioned Hamm opted for flip flops while recording, which got a big laugh from the crowd as Hamm congenially clarified that he wore slides with socks — making podcasts is smart business.
“The growth of the sector, for want of a better phrase, has been phenomenal over the last decade or so. Even the word podcast didn’t exist 15 years ago, so the potential is limitless,” Hamm said, noting that the barriers to entry are low. “You really need a microphone and an idea and a connection to the internet. And then the limits are your creativity.”
Where turning “The Big Fix” into a movie would’ve cost $100 million, he explained, making a podcast was considerably more cost-effective, creating more opportunity for historically significant, yet “difficult to sell,” stories to reach audiences.
“’The Big Fix’ is about an inconvenient truth,” Hamm said, describing how the Mexican American landowners of the Chavez Ravine were forcefully removed to make way for Dodgers Stadium to be built. “Those people had lives and families and history and generations and culture. That is such a huge part of Los Angeles, and it’s been forgotten in a lot of ways. Latin people in L.A. love the fucking Dodgers, but they also are like, Chavez Ravine was a huge part of our collective history as a culture and it’s important to not forget that.”
The phenomenon of displaced populations is not unique to Los Angeles, Hamm continued, using his native St. Louis for an example. “There’s a beautiful piece of public art called the Gateway Arch. It’s the pride of our city. They bulldozed an African American community for that to exist. People don’t talk about it, but it happened.”
That’s where media can make the most impact, like the way Hamm didn’t know about the events of the Tulsa race massacre until he saw HBO’s “Watchmen.”
“There’s a tremendous amount of stories to be told, and when the financial imperative isn’t that ‘This has to make a billion dollars to be successful or seen,’ then you can tell those stories,” Hamm said. “It’s giving people an opportunity to go, “Wait a minute, how come I didn’t know about that? Maybe I should look a little closer.”
“The Big Lie” is available now on Audible, while the eight-part series “The Big Fix: A Jack Bergin Mystery” debuts on April 24. Listen to the trailer below: