Jonathan Tropper received his first real Emmy nomination for season two of Apple TV’s Your Friends & Neighbors — not that he expected it. That’s not modesty, it was ignorance. Your Friends & Neighbors season three, which picks up just two weeks after the second season ends, was filming on location in Europe when the nominations came out. Tropper says he didn’t even know it was nominations day.
“It just wasn’t on our radar,” Tropper tells The Hollywood Reporter.
The show wasn’t nominated for season one — does this mean season two is better than season one?
You love all your kids, right? The show was successful in season one. It got a lot of acclaim, and it got a lot of viewers. And then in season two, it just felt like we hit another level. Season twos are always more fun to do because you don’t have to do any world-building. It’s all about taking the characters you’ve already built and going deeper. I never think about awards, especially since I tend to be a bit of a populist when I write, and that’s the stuff that tends to not necessarily get the nominations. Also, I thought of our show as something that people were loving, but you know, is it a comedy or is it a drama? We’re one hour, so we’re a drama, but we’re not a drama like certain other shows are dramas, and that makes it tricky when it comes to awards because we don’t necessarily fit cleanly into a category. So, I was thrilled that there was enough consensus to at least put us in the conversation.
Why does Coop (Jon Hamm) not wear a mask?
There’s an absurdist bend to our show, and from a purely practical perspective, we want to see Jon Hamm’s face. But as far as our show logic, the notion is in these neighborhoods, people really don’t use their security systems because the neighborhood has its own patrol. It’s very safe. It has a crime rate of almost zero, and [Coop] does use a Wi-Fi jammer to take out their Wi-Fi-based camera system. So, we address it. The notion is that you know he’s going to walk in and out of these houses, and he’s a guy who, if you see him, you wouldn’t necessarily suspect he’s up to no good. But if he’s wearing a mask, he’s basically telegraphing, “I’m up to no good.” So, the idea, which we convey in the pilot and a few other times, is if you happen to see him walking off your front stoop or off your yard and he’s just wearing sweats, you wouldn’t say, “Oh my God, he just robbed my house.” You would assume he had some other reason for being there.
Jon did not get nominated for the series — again. What are your thoughts on that?
I didn’t in any way assume the show would get nominated for outstanding drama, but I always assumed people would notice his performance and nominate him. I’m pretty surprised that two seasons in, he still hasn’t been nominated. He’s doing something pretty nuanced and careful and exceptional on our show, which is sort of showing the crumbling of this alpha man. He’s almost deconstructing his own persona. He’s doing it [with] really complex and nuanced bits of vulnerability and failure and a total lack of vanity. I do think it’s a performance that should have been recognized, and I hope it will be at some point.
This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.