The always-charming Dominic Cooper has played some of the slickest characters on the big and small screen, including Tony Stark’s Howard Hughes-ian father, Howard, in a series of MCU productions, and the hellraising Jesse Custer in AMC’s Preacher. Now, he’s turning that charisma into the purposes of evil in a new series for Paramount+. The series is an adaptation of the popular 2019 Australian podcast of the same name; both are based on the true story of Hamish McLaren, a globe-trotting con artist.
In Who the Hell Is Hamish?, Cooper stars as the title character; he’s a cultured, magnetic individual who charms his way into the heart of Bec (Claire van der Boom, Hawaii Five-0), a single mother who’s sitting on a substantial trust fund. However, Bec soon realizes that Hamish’s life doesn’t seem to entirely add up; she starts to put the pieces of his past together and finds a disturbing pattern. The six-episode drama series has now wrapped filming in Queensland, Australia, and will premiere on Paramount+ globally later this year.
Paramount announced the series with a first-look image of Cooper as Hamish, looking pensive with a blonde dye job. The series was written and created by Adam Zwar, who created the original Australian version of Wilfred; it was directed by Jeffrey Walker, a veteran of Australian series like Apple Cider Vinegar and The Artful Dodger. Says Tracey Robertson, a producer on the series and the CEO of production company Hoodlum Entertainment: “After six years in development, it’s extraordinary to see Who The Hell Is Hamish? finally come to life. Adam Zwar’s scripts are razor-sharp, full of wit, tension, and deep compassion for the people at the heart of this story, and Jeffrey Walker has brought them to the screen with a confidence and craft that is genuinely world-class.”
Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In? The Pitt · ER · Grey’s Anatomy · House · Scrubs
Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Eight questions will figure out exactly where you belong.
🚨The Pitt
🏥ER
💉Grey’s
🔬House
🩺Scrubs
01
A critical patient comes through the door. What’s your first instinct? Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are.
02
Why did you go into medicine in the first place? The honest answer says more about you than the one you’d give in an interview.
03
What do you actually want from the people you work with? Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are.
04
You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it? Every doctor who’s worked a long shift has had to answer this question.
05
How would your colleagues describe the way you work? Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image.
06
How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure? Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice.
07
What does this job cost you personally? Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What’s yours?
08
At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back? The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you.
Your Assignment Has Been Made You Belong In…
Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center
The Pitt
You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn’t let you look away.
You need your work to be real, not romanticised — meaning over drama, honesty over aesthetics.
You find purpose inside the work itself, not in the chaos surrounding it.
You’ve made peace with the fact that this job takes from you constantly, and gives back in ways that are harder to name.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center demands exactly that kind of person — and you would not want to be anywhere else.
County General Hospital, Chicago
ER
You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential.
You show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without needing the job to be anything other than what it is.
You care about patients as individual human beings, not as cases to solve or dramas to live through.
You believe in the system even when it fails you — and you understand that emergency medicine is about holding the line just long enough.
ER is television about endurance. You have it.
Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, Seattle
Grey’s Anatomy
You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.
You feel things fully and form deep attachments to the people you work with.
Your personal and professional lives are permanently, chaotically entangled — and that entanglement drives both your greatest disasters and your most remarkable saves.
You understand that extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection.
It’s messy at Grey Sloan. You would not have it any other way.
Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, NJ
House
You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn’t fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.
You’re not primarily motivated by the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you’d deny it.
You work best when the stakes are highest and the standard answer is wrong.
Princeton-Plainsboro exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind — and everyone around that mind is there because they’re smart enough to keep up.
The only way forward here is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you do.
Sacred Heart Hospital, California
Scrubs
You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.
You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field.
You use humour to get through terrible moments — and at Sacred Heart, that’s not a flaw, it’s a survival strategy.
You lean on the people around you and let them lean back. The laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable here.
Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job. You are still very much in the middle of that process — which is exactly right.
Who Else Stars in ‘Who the Hell Is Hamish?’
Dominic Cooper in Who the Hell Is Hamish?Image via Paramount
In addition to Cooper and van der Boom, the series also features an all-star Australian cast, including Simone Kessell(Yellowjackets), William McKenna (Good Cop/Bad Cop), Kate Jenkinson (Monarch: Legacy of Monsters), Miah Madden (My Brilliant Career), Fraser Anderson (Black Snow), Yasmin Kassim (Anaconda), Doris Younane (Last King of the Cross), Maria Angelico (Strife), Marta Dusseldorp (Bay of Fires), John Howard (Mad Max: Fury Road), Andrea Moor (Deadloch), Joel Jackson (Play Dead), Remy Hii (Spider-Man: Far From Home), Damien Garvey (Nautilus), Jack LaTorre (Nine Perfect Strangers) and newcomer Harvey Bowen.
Who the Hell Is Hamish? has wrapped production and will be released on Paramount+ later this year. Stay tuned to Collider for future updates.
