The BBC and Amazon series, Good Omens has added Baby Driver actor Jon Hamm to the cast, taking on the role as the Archangel Gabriel.

Related: Michael Sheen and David Tennant look a treat in the first look image from Good Omens

The TV adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s novel is currently in production on the six-episode series which is due to air in 200 countries worldwide on Amazon Prime in 2019 and will be seen on BBC later in the same year.

Jon Hamm shared his thoughts on the story: “I read Good Omens almost twenty years ago. I thought it was one of the funniest, coolest books I’d ever read. It was also, obviously, unfilmable. Two months ago Neil sent me the scripts, and I knew I had to be in it.”

Good Omens

Although the character of the Archangel Gabriel only has a small part to play in the novel, Gaiman, who is also a runner on the show, revealed that Pratchett and himself had started to plot a sequel in which Gabriel would off had a bigger part to play as the angels would be more prominent.

“Once we had finished writing Good Omens, back in the dawn of prehistory, Terry Pratchett and I started plotting a sequel. There would have been a lot of angels in the sequel. When Good Omens was first published and was snapped up for the first time by Hollywood, Terry and I took joy in introducing our angels into the plot of a movie that was never made. So when, almost thirty years later, I started writing Good Omens for TV, one thing I knew was that our angels would have to be in there.

“The leader of these angels is Gabriel. He is everything that Aziraphale isn’t: he’s tall, good-looking, charismatic and impeccably dressed. We were fortunate that Jon Hamm was available, given that he is already all of these things without even having to act. We were even more fortunate that he’s a fan of the books and a remarkable actor.”

The series will be helmed by director/executive producer Douglas Mackinnon, whose credits include Knightfall, Dirk Gently, Doctor Who, Outlander and the standalone Victorian episode of Sherlock: The Abominable Bride.