film, Reed was immediately captivated by Judi Dench's portrayal of M—the head of the Secret Intelligence Service. "I was spinning my wheels on that," Reed remarked, "and then it clicked when I was watching the James Bond reboot with Judi Dench as M, and then I thought what if M was James Bond’s mother, and what a weird dynamic that would be, and what if they were both horrible people." FX initially disapproved of Archer's bumbling demeanor, as similar endeavors have previously been done on multiple occasions. This made it especially difficult on Reed in writing the script for "Mole Hunt", the pilot episode of the series. "It was hard, if a guy’s really good looking and apparently rich and has a great apartment and has really great clothes and dates all the girls and could kick your face off, if he’s also the smartest guy in the room, you’re not going to root for him." Indeed, he would often debate with the executives of FX on the character throughout the first season, but concerns later subsided after Reed asserted that Archer was merely overconfident, and not dumb. "He’s just supremely confident and thinks that nothing bad is ever going to happen to him, so in these dangerous situations where he’s being an idiot, he’s just being willfully obtuse to see what will happen." All of the main characters on the program were modeled after a select group of local residents of Atlanta. The producers then had them dressed in period clothing. "We just grabbed people around here, and then it was just sort of a fluke that they ended up looking like, to some extent, their real-life counterparts." Archer was designed after an electrician who, according to Adam Reed, was "exactly that handsome and also really nice". Casting Reed originally wanted to provide the voice of the character, but eventually recognized that his voice would stand out among other professional actors. H. Jon Benjamin—whom Reed was familiar with from his work on various Adult Swim cartoons such as The Venture Bros. and Home Movies—was approached by Reed for the role of Archer while Benjamin was visiting his parents in Tucson, Arizona. Benjamin was given a copy of the pilot script, and later recorded it at a Tucson studio the following week, relating, "So I think I just went in to this—it was in the back of this guy’s house