LA Noire Developer Considered Mad Men Star Jon Hamm for the Role of Cole Phelps, but Had a Very Good Reason for Going With Aaron Staton Instead

The creative team behind LA Noire considered Mad Men star Jon Hamm for the role of Cole Phelps.

I recently interviewed Daniel McMahon, a writer who worked on the Rockstar-published LA Noire, for a YouTube video about the 2011 detective game and its cancelled successor, Whore of the Orient. Our conversation was wide-spanning, but I was curious about one thing: was Jon Hamm ever considered for a part in the game?

For those that don’t know, LA Noire features a number of actors from the TV series Mad Men, including Aaron Staton, the man who plays the game’s protagonist, Cole Phelps. Hamm’s breakout role came from playing the lead of Don Draper in Mad Men, so I figured he must’ve been on developer Team Bondi’s radar.

McMahon noted that Mad Men and LA Noire shared the same casting director, which is likely why the two projects share so many faces. He also confirmed to me that yes, Hamm was discussed as a possibility for the role of Cole Phelps. McMahon shared images of Hamm wearing a suit and hat from Mad Men with the team on the game, showing that he perfectly fit the vibe and tone of LA Noire. However, it didn’t happen.

“It was never said at the time, but now, I understand the vision which was Jon Hamm is a wonderful actor, but he’s not Cole Phelps,” McMahon said. “Jon Hamm would’ve been a much better Jack Kelso because he’s a character of great power, he’s a character of control. Jon Hamm knows what he’s doing and gets s**t done.

“Aaron Staton was much better at portraying Cole’s fragility. A lot of the time, Cole’s flapping around having no idea what he’s doing. He’s very smart, but he’s also young, not very experienced, and he’s just trying his best. So, I think Jon Hamm would’ve been incredible, but expensive, and probably, in the end, not as good casting for that character as Aaron Staton was.”

Cole Phelps and Don Draper do share similar stories, but are portrayed completely differently. Both men are World War II veterans trying desperately to run away from their failures overseas to avoid being consumed by guilt. They also both cheat on their wives, leading to the implosion of their families. Draper and Phelps are also consumed by their jobs and each career win inflates their ego, creating an unstainable arc. Their stories ultimately take different paths in the end, but it would’ve been interesting to see Hamm play Phelps or the game’s second protagonist, Jack Kelso, as McMahon suggested.

Ever since LA Noire’s release, fans of the game have called on Rockstar to green light a sequel. Earlier this year, Strauss Zelnick, boss of Rockstar parent company Take-Two, gave fans a sliver of hope that LA Noire 2 might happen one day.

“Broadly, we’re looking at doing something in the future with all of our intellectual property,” he said. “There’s nothing to announce on LA Noire specifically, and if there were, it would be Rockstar announcing it, not me. But in any case, with regard to our legacy IP, the teams are always looking at what we have and we’re always thinking about it. The question is, at any given time, do we have a team that’s passionate about working on that?”

Photo by: Peter Kramer/NBC/NBC Newswire/NBCUniversal via Getty Images.

Cade Onder is a freelancer for IGN’s news team. He covers all things entertainment, including gaming, film, and more. You can find him on Twitter @Cade_Onder.