SUMMER 2024 | EDITED BY CHRIS HEWITT
J.K. SIMMONS’ KINDLY, inviting face and soothing voice has often prompted Hollywood to cast him as warm, avuncular types. He’s Juno’s dad, for one. But he has a rotter in him. When those eyes turn cold, watch out. This is a trait that has also been exploited adroitly over the years —it was his hilarious turn as the cynical newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man that first alerted most people to Simmons. And then, of course, his unforgettable performance as Terence Fletcher, the brutal jazz teacher in Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, turned him into an icon and won him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 2015. And now that penchant for prickishness is being exploited in new film You Can’t Run Forever by, of all people, his wife, Michelle Schumacher, who directs Simmons as Wade, a seemingly unstoppable psychopath who embarks on a random killing spree. We caught up with Simmons from his home in New York to talk about his storied career.
When your wife came to you and said, “I’ve got a role for you. It’s an unrepentant, psychopathic killer, and you’re the only guy who can play it”, how did that make you feel?