Producers Want Jon Hamm For Live-Action 'Archer' Movie (If A Live-Action 'Archer' Movie Ever Happens)

The characters of Archer have only changed so much over the years. If they ever truly evolved as people, after all, they'd no longer be the unrepentant a**holes we've come to love. But the show itself has morphed a couple of times, first into a crime show in season 5 and then into a P.I. series in season 7. Might Archer make an even bigger leap someday? Like into the world of live-action films, perhaps?

Executive producer Matt Thompson isn't ruling out a possible Archer movie, revealing that he and series creator Adam Reed "have definitely talked about it." And while they've yet to make up their mind about whether this (purely theoretical, at this point) movie would be animated or live-action, they know exactly who they'd want playing Sterling Archer if they go the latter route: Mad Men star Jon Hamm. 

Speaking to The Daily Beast, Thompson readily admitted that he's considered the potential for an Archer movie:

It's all up to whatever Adam wants to do, but he and I have definitely talked about it. I think we talk about it once every two years. We vacillate between if you do it, why are you doing the TV show? And should it be live-action, or should it be cartoon? The talk is there, we just still haven't decided. I don't think there will be a movie before the last episode of Archer airs on TV. I don't think we'll make a movie before the series finishes.

Archer wrapped up its seventh season earlier this month, and FX has not yet renewed the show for an eighth season. Depending on how things go, "after the series finishes" could be pretty soon. And Thompson already has some preliminary casting for Sterling Archer in mind, just in case:

It's Jon Hamm. If Archer goes live-action, I do believe it will be Jon Hamm. Maybe you could do it with Jon Benjamin's voice coming out of him? I don't know. Adam is always like, 'I don't know if I want the movie to be live-action because I want it to be Jon Benjamin!' But if it is live-action—and if it is not Jon Benjamin—it is our greatest hope that it would be Jon Hamm. I can say that with confidence.

While none of the Archer characters are explicitly modeled after their voice-actor counterparts (here's who they're based on instead), most of them resemble each other to varying degrees. Lana doesn't not look like Aisha Tyler, Mallory is a dead ringer for Jessica Walter's other signature character, Lucille Bluth, and Cyril looks more or less like a cartoon Chris Parnell.

This is not the case with Sterling Archer and H. Jon Benjamin. Archer and the man who plays him look so different that the season 2 DVD sketch even comes with a short film titled "L'espion mal fait" which imagines how horrified Archer would be if he woke up looking like Benjamin. We don't have an embed to share with you here, but track it down if you're an Archer fan who hasn't seen it — it's one of the funniest jokes the show has ever done.

Hamm, on the other hand, looks basically exactly like Sterling Archer. He's got the height, the model-handsome features, the jet-black hair, and the strong jaw. And as seen in both his award-winning work on Mad Men and his hilarious career since Mad Men, he's got Archer's "charming a**hole" schtick down. In fact, we've even seen what would happen if Hamm came into the show's orbit — he guest-starred as Captain Murphy in season 4's two-part finale.

The only drawback, of course, is that Hamm wouldn't have Benjamin's perfect voice. Times like this, it's really too bad Krieger isn't a real person. You know that guy could come up with some twisted plan to create some sort of Hamm-Benjamin hybrid cyborg — that is, if he doesn't have one lying around in lab storage already.