Whiskey in Film and TV | Hollywood’s Favorite Spirit, Counted

It started with Don Draper. I was rewatching Mad Men, as one does when one has decided to feel elegant and slightly unwell for a week, and I noticed something: every time the man is thinking, he’s holding a whiskey. Every time he’s lying, whiskey. Seducing, whiskey. Being fired, whiskey. And I thought, is it just him? So, being a person who writes about drinks for a living and therefore has no reasonable excuse, I started counting. Not scientifically. A notebook, a pen, and every film and series I could think of where a character’s drink is part of who they are. The question was simple: is whiskey actually Hollywood’s favorite spirit, or does it just feel that way because I want it to be?

Spoiler: it isn’t close. But the interesting part isn’t the number. It’s which whiskey each character drinks, because Hollywood, it turns out, has a startlingly precise grammar for it. Bourbon means one thing, Scotch another, Canadian something else entirely, and a single bottle of Japanese whisky once became so famous the distillery had to stop making it. If you want to know what the rest of us should actually be drinking, my best whiskey guide has 40 answers. This is about what the screen thinks we should be drinking, and what it’s trying to tell us.

Here’s the notebook, tidied up. I’ve kept it to characters whose whiskey is genuinely part of the character, not someone who once held a glass at a wedding.

Thirteen entries, and that’s before I let myself count every Western, which would have required a second notebook and a lie-down. Not a single gin. No rum outside of pirates. Tequila gets a cameo. Vodka gets exactly one character, and even he keeps sneaking off for a Macallan. Whiskey wins by a landslide. Now the fun bit: why these whiskeys, and what each one is doing.

Bourbon: the honest American

Look at who drinks bourbon on my list. John Dutton, Beth Dutton, Raylan Givens, Frank Underwood. Ranchers, a US Marshal and a Southern politician. Bourbon on screen means America, land, family, a man (or, in Beth’s case, the most terrifying person in Montana) who knows exactly who they are. It’s the whiskey of people with dirt on their boots or blood on their hands, sometimes both, and it’s almost never drunk from a fancy glass. Frank Underwood pouring a bourbon while addressing the camera is the whole character in one gesture: plain-spoken, Southern, lethal. Nobody on television drinks bourbon while feeling sophisticated. They drink it while feeling right. If that’s your mood, my best bourbon guide is where to start, and the Old Fashioned is the cocktail.

Scotch: money, power, and men behind desks

Now look at the Scotch drinkers. Harvey Specter, Tony Soprano, the Roys, Ron Burgundy, Ron Swanson. Every one of them a man of status, real or self-appointed. Scotch on screen means power, expense, and the ability to pour a drink in an office at 3pm without anyone questioning it. Harvey Specter’s Macallan is practically a character on Suits; Logan Roy’s world runs on Scotch so old and so expensive it’s a weapon, exactly the scarcity-as-status game I picked apart in why whisky has a Rolex problem. Even Ron Burgundy, who is a buffoon, reaches for Scotch precisely because it’s what important men drink, which is the joke. And Ron Swanson’s Lagavulin is the perfect version: Nick Offerman genuinely loves the stuff, and the writers built it into the character, so the smoky Islay malt became shorthand for a man of few words and strong opinions. Scotch is the whiskey of people who want you to know they’ve arrived.

Canadian: the slick operator

Don Draper is the outlier, and the most interesting entry. His bottle is Canadian Club, a light, easy, blended Canadian whisky, and his cocktail is the Old Fashioned, made with rye in the famous “My Old Kentucky Home” episode. It’s exactly right for him: smooth, agreeable, going down easy, hiding a great deal. Mad Men did something no drinks brand could buy: bartenders reported an actual “Mad Men effect,” with Old Fashioneds, Manhattans and Martinis ordered daily and customers told “how Don Draper of you.” A fictional ad man revived the classic cocktail for real, which, when you think about it, is the most Don Draper thing imaginable.

Irish: the outsider with a grudge

Tommy Shelby drinks Irish whiskey in a Birmingham gangster epic, and that’s not an accident. Irish whiskey on screen means the underdog, the man from the wrong side of something, the smoother-tasting spirit that still carries a chip on its shoulder. It’s the whiskey of people building an empire out of nothing and not entirely trusting anyone who was born into one.

Japanese: the one that broke the distillery

And then there’s Bob Harris. In Lost in Translation, Bill Murray plays a fading star paid, in his own words, two million dollars to front a Suntory campaign, delivering the immortal “For relaxing times, make it Suntory time” while a director screams at him in Japanese. The bottle in his hand was Hibiki 17. What happened next is the single best piece of evidence for this whole article: the film is widely credited with helping ignite the Japanese whisky boom, demand for aged stock ran so far ahead of supply that in 2018 Suntory discontinued Hibiki 17 entirely for “supply constraints,” and surviving bottles now change hands for close to a thousand dollars. A comedy scene about a bad advert became the most effective whiskey advert ever made. And it’s a reminder that the interesting whiskey stories now come from outside Scotland and Kentucky, something I’ve seen firsthand in India’s single malt boom. Suntory clearly knows it: for its 100th anniversary in 2023, it asked Sofia Coppola to direct the tribute film, starring Keanu Reeves, cutting in scenes from her own movie.

Bond is the exception that proves the rule, and the reason I couldn’t file him under one column. Yes, the vodka Martini, shaken, is his signature, and I’ve covered the best vodkas for anyone who wants to play along. But watch what Craig’s Bond actually drinks when the plot isn’t forcing a catchphrase on him. In Skyfall it’s Macallan, repeatedly: the 1962 Fine & Rare Silva pours in the famous face-off, a nod to Dr. No’s 1962 release, and a morning dram at a Turkish beach bar. In Spectre there’s a bottle of Macallan 18 in his flat. He’s drunk bourbon and Talisker along the way too. In other words, when the world’s most famous spy is off duty, he drinks whiskey. The Martini is for the brand. The Scotch is for him.

I nearly didn’t count the Westerns because they’d have broken the tally. A hundred years of cinema in which a stranger walks into a saloon, slaps a coin on the bar, and gets a shot of whiskey slammed in front of him, no label, no age statement, no tasting note beyond “rough.” It’s the purest version of whiskey on screen: not a status symbol, not a character quirk, just fuel and courage and a way to establish that a man has arrived somewhere dangerous. From Stagecoach to Unforgiven to Yellowstone, the genre has never once seriously considered a gin and tonic, and I respect that. If you’re wondering what those anonymous saloon shots would actually have been, mostly rough bourbon and rye, my bourbon vs whiskey explainer untangles it.

Yes. Emphatically, and it isn’t even a contest. But the real answer is more interesting than the number. Hollywood doesn’t just prefer whiskey; it uses whiskey as a language. Bourbon for the honest and the dangerous. Scotch for the powerful and the pompous. Canadian for the smooth operator. Irish for the outsider. Japanese for the man adrift. A screenwriter can tell you who someone is by what’s in their glass before they’ve said a word, and whiskey offers more dialects than any other spirit. Gin gives you a Martini. Whiskey gives you a whole character.

There’s a reason for that beyond taste. Whiskey is slow. You sip it, you hold it, you look into it. It buys a character a pause, and pauses are where acting happens. Nobody has ever stared meaningfully out of a rain-streaked window holding a Piña Colada. It also photographs beautifully: amber in a heavy glass, catching a lamp, one ice cube if any. It’s the drink that looks like thinking. And it sells: the Mad Men effect, the Lagavulin bump, the Hibiki 17 shortage. Hollywood didn’t invent whiskey’s appeal, but it’s spent a century amplifying it, one brooding close-up at a time, which makes the celebrity-spirits gold rush I wrote about in celebrity tequila look like a very late arrival.

What whiskey does Don Draper drink?

Canadian Club, a blended Canadian whisky, and his cocktail is the Old Fashioned, memorably made with rye in Mad Men’s “My Old Kentucky Home.”

What whiskey does James Bond drink?

Beyond the vodka Martini, Craig’s Bond drinks Macallan repeatedly, the 1962 Fine & Rare in Skyfall and Macallan 18 in Spectre, as well as bourbon and Talisker.

What whiskey does Ron Swanson drink?

Lagavulin, the smoky Islay single malt, written into Parks and Recreation because actor Nick Offerman genuinely loves it.

What whiskey is in Lost in Translation?

Suntory Hibiki 17. The film is widely credited with fuelling the Japanese whisky boom; Suntory discontinued Hibiki 17 in 2018 due to supply constraints, and bottles now sell for close to $1,000.

Is whiskey the most common spirit in films and TV?

By my count of characters whose drink defines them, overwhelmingly yes: Scotch and bourbon dominate, with Canadian, Irish and Japanese whiskeys each claiming an iconic character, while gin, rum, tequila and vodka barely register.

BY VIM, EDITOR OF 12×75. Character drinks are as depicted on screen and widely reported; brands aren’t endorsing anyone here. Please drink responsibly.