YOU FIND him on page 166 of the 1970 Thomas Worthington High School yearbook. It's the kind of high school interchangeable with every other American high school—the same brick, the same tomb-like sign on the entrance lawn, the same head of some animal pasted everywhere—and the kind of yearbook, also interchangeable, where somehow each page demands a sports photo. You find him, there, in a middle row on the JV football team. The Cardinals. The boys wear shoulder pads and underneath some wear the team T-shirt, “Worthington Football” written on the chest above a ball and the team’s motto beneath: “It’s gotta hurt!”
He stands there, Jonathan Kimble Simmons. He is a freshman, with a long face and an impressive blonde mane. And he doesn’t want to be a jock anymore.
There are clear delineations in social life at Thomas Worthington High School in Worthington, Ohio: you are a jock, you are a nerd, or you are a weird hippie freak. You cannot cross these lines.
He isn’t sure how to tell his friends, but Simmons wants to cross these lines. He’s tired of it all. The training. The practices. The two-a-days over the summer where he isn’t allowed water, because water, as Simmons remembers his Coach saying, water is for pussies. The same Coach kicks Simmons in the ass for biting on the offensive sweep and walks over his chest during leg exercises. If Simmons has to vomit, he vomits through his facemask.
But Simmons is fifteen and he would rather pursue girls than running backs. He thinks the jock girls aren’t as pretty as the hippie girls, and what’s the point of being a jock—what’s the point of all this hurt—if the girls aren’t as pretty? None. There is no point.
Thankfully, Simmons has an escape plan. It is hidden in this photo, behind the blonde heads of other shoulder-padded boys: his knees. They are swelling below the joints. He has developed something called Osgood-Schlatter disease, and it will be the end of his football career, the end of being a jock. His knees will save him. They will help him cross the line.
Much later, J.K. Simmons, 66, will have crossed more than one boundary. He will have exchanged one identity for another, one career for another. The boy in the photograph will become a movie star—and not just one capable of comic book blockbusters and art house Oscar-winners. He will also be a man committed to family, steadfast during crisis. It will all come later in his life, this fame and maturity, and the way he handles it will be a lesson. His career and his reaction to fame can offer many of us a better way to think about “success.”
For now, you find him in this photo, unsmiling. In later yearbooks, you can find him elsewhere, his swooped, side-parted blonde hair hovering in group drama club photos and rising above choir lines. He looks happier in these photos. He made it.
And while it will not be the first line he crosses, it will make everything else possible.
J.K. SIMMONS is fifty-one years older. His hair, which had reached a luscious “Gregg Allman” peak at 21—before his “karmic payback”—is gone. He sports what could be either two weeks or two months of white beard growth. Where that mane once flowed, he wears a black baseball cap with the title of Michelle Schumacher’s, his wife’s, previous film on the side: “I’m Not Here.” Simmons was the lead.
He laughs at that 1970 Thomas Worthington High School yearbook photo. Then, getting into character, he enthusiastically recites the team chant, “1! 2! 3! 4! What do you say? It's gotta hurt!”—in a voice that’s low and drawling and probably meant to sound like a cacophony of jocks, but really sounds like his Yellow M&M. It’s a joke, perhaps, or maybe an insight. He chants this before shaking his head. “It was such another time.”
In this time, the age when J.K. Simmons is neither a jock nor a hippie freak, but one of the most in-demand actors in the English-speaking world, he is everywhere. Just this year, thanks to production delays, online director cut campaigns, and preposterous prolificacy, Simmons has appeared in one television series (Goliath), voice-acted in three (Invincible, Infinity Train, The Great North), and starred in five movies (The Tomorrow War, Ride the Eagle, Being the Ricardos, National Champions, Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and Spider-Man: No Way Home), three of which are out this month.
Two of those films, Being the Ricardos and National Champions, may put Simmons in a Best Supporting Actor conversation; Simmons first won the Oscar in 2014, at 60, for his role in Whiplash. Being the Ricardos, Aaron Sorkin’s latest, finds Simmons portraying I Love Lucy actor William Frawley in a more subdued role. In National Champions, he portrays a fictional college football coach facing off against his own team, who are protesting the final game over NCAA player rights—and the racially coded system in which they exist.
J.K. Simmons as Coach James Lazor in National Champions.
In the middle of the film, his character gives a speech before the title game. It’s the speech given in every fictional locker room—and a laughable trope of sports cinema. Coming from Simmons, however, the speech hits different, both sincere but also tragic in the Greek sense: it brims with defeat. The refrain of the speech is “you, men”—as in, you have just become men; savor every moment. “I know right now you think life is always gonna be like this: you’re at the center of everything, alive,” the coach says. “And greatness is right there, within reach. But that’s not true.”
What’s true, the coach insists, is that greatness passes; it is there when you are young, and then it is gone. For Simmons himself, the message seems false. Simmons was rounding 40 when he landed his first major screen role. Before then, he was a regional theater actor. In an age of young actors catapulted into instant stardom, Simmons walked a much longer road into the spotlight: he had been acting for almost two decades before a camera ever captured his work. “Greatness,” for him, came later.
But in another sense, the coach is right. For Simmons, “greatness” never meant success. Those early years remain more fulfilling than future Hollywood award ceremonies and multi-million-dollar weekend acting gigs. He was closer to “greatness” in the middle row of that JV photo than accepting an Oscar three decades later.
“Look at me. I’m 60 years old. I look like I’m 80,” Simmons’ coach tells the room of young athletes. “Forty years ago, I was you. I was you, men: magnificent. ... What I wouldn’t give to be you, men.”
But the real J.K. Simmons, his Gregg Allman hair gone, his beard white, disagrees.
HERE IS a scene from the life of Jonathan Kimble Simmons, before he was J.K., in the years when he was magnificent.
He is 28. He is walking up 9th Avenue from a wholesaler where he has just purchased a large case of dirt-cheap beer. It is summer and the concrete is roasting as he crosses Columbus Circle into Central Park where he plans to sell the beer, $1 a can, to the men kicking soccer balls and the men playing softball. He will make $15 each case, maybe $45 that day, and then pull out his glove and join the game and then go home to some shithole sublet in Hell’s Kitchen where he crashes between acting jobs. The theater gigs pay maybe $40 a day, and so without the beer, he will not make rent. These are the best days.
Simmons was born in Detroit but spent the majority of childhood in Ohio. (The only thing inherited from his first home: an undying support for the Tigers.) He went from Ohio to Montana for college—he studied music and expected to become a conductor, before he found stage acting—and then moved to Seattle for theater. At 27, having run the Seattle theater circuit for a few years, Simmons drove to NYC in a junk Fiat convertible with just $400, hoping to get just one acting gig, or two, and not wait tables until, until, until.
In retrospect, having “made it,” Simmons’ story is the story of nearly every movie star—a road trip, scanty cash, paltry essentials—and yet he is an anomaly. He had no clear ambition, no dream other than the occasional gig. He expected nothing.
“I didn’t really have specific goals,” Simmons remembers. “I didn’t even really have ambition—other than once I fell in love with theater, I just wanted to keep acting.”
Simmons in his Oscar-winning performance for Whiplash.
So began Simmons’ journeyman years: doing Shakespeare in Pittsburgh and then musical theater in Buffalo and then a play in Albany, returning each time to New York, selling beers to make rent, getting by. “I don’t use the word ‘struggle,’” Simmons says, dispelling any actorly romanticism. “Struggle is people who have three kids and are trying to keep a roof over their heads. I was just a single, dumbass guy with no responsibilities other than getting a slice of pizza.”
Broadway was as big as Simmons expected, or wanted, or could have hoped to climb. He got there. In 1990, Simmons made his Broadway debut in A Change in the Heir. It wasn’t until 1994, when Simmons was approaching 40, that he even considered screen acting, even considered crossing that line. His decision to audition for television was financial: TV provided a steadier paycheck in the form of residuals. He made the move for money, but not riches.
When he joined the Screen Actors Guild, Simmons needed a name to put on his card. His own name had already been taken. He used “J.K.”
HERE IS another scene, in the life of J.K. Simmons, on a March evening in 2020. He is walking up Fifth Avenue.
It is dark, but not late. The people who normally throng the avenues are gone. No cars. No bicycles. The summers of carrying beer across these streets are almost three decades past; like JV football in Ohio, they are now simply another time.
He has taken a week off from filming to visit his son, Ben, in college. His wife has also made the trip. The family now faces an emergency: Ben’s roommate has tested positive for Covid-19. The two share a 300 square-foot apartment. How fast will it spread? Simmons wonders. How vulnerable are we, or the rest of the family? Earlier that day, Simmons had taken his bicycle from Union Square and ridden out to Queens. There, he bought a minivan. He threw his bike in the back and returned to the city where his wife had constructed a MacGyver-esque boy in the bubble suit, made with plastic dry-cleaning bags and duct tape—for Ben. Their plan: drive home to L.A., survive.
The next day, the couple sits up front. Ben, in his bubble boy suit, rides in back. The windows go down. And Simmons drives—down the deserted island, across state boarders, away from an empty Times Square, the empty theaters, where Simmons, with no responsibilities, no expectation, was once magnificent.
He does not know when he might return.
THE JUMP from Broadway to television was never a sure step. At the time, in 1996, Simmons wondered whether he should make it at all. That first big role, Vernon Schillinger, the head of the Aryan Brotherhood in Oz, unnerved Simmons. “There was a danger that if this is first thing everybody sees me do,” Simmons remembers thinking, “nobody’s going to ask me to do anything except play the Nazi of the week on every cop show.” As soon as Oz premiered, Simmons’ on-screen presence became simply “the most despicable human being on the planet.”
Luckily, Simmons found another role at the same time: Emil Skoda, the psychiatrist, on Law & Order. If casting directors wanted Simmons for more than Nazi of the Week, they now could see both ends of the Simmons spectrum: the calm, probing wit and the hair-trigger rage.
His screen roles have since run that range. They are often older men, often hard men, a result of Simmons’ entrance into the spotlight and his gruffer appearance. “When your screen acting career starts in your 40s and you’re already bald...” Simmons offers dryly, “Let’s face it: It’s not my boyish good looks that got me to where I am.”
Simmons as Vern Schillinger in Oz.
There’s a physicality to those characters, and not just one that comes with age. Simmons began working out seriously after the first season of Oz, during which he was famously shot butt naked in solitary confinement. Simmons, over 40 pounds heavier then, didn’t like the look. On watching himself in the early Oz seasons, he once said: “Who is the fat guy trying to act tough?”
He has since made fitness a habit. In 2016, the internet blew up over a photo of him, which he has termed “shredded Santa.” He was bearded and doing bicep curls in a cut-off. While some thought the transformation was for his role as Commissioner Gordon in Justice League, Simmons was simply lifting to lift. (Arnold Schwarzenegger apparently took Simmons to Gold’s Gym while filming Terminator: Genisys, introducing him to the “arm blaster.”)
That gruff physicality, however, isn’t always played for drama. Even viewers too young to watch the Swastika-branding Schillinger, know Simmons for his physical presence, his sudden outbursts as screaming newspaperman J. Jonah Jameson in maybe the most true-to-comics acting performance in superhero cinema. This month, Simmons will reprise the role for a fifth time, joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe as an InfoWars version of the character in Spider-Man: No Way Home. Simmons insists his performance is still taken from the comics, still the “same guy” as the Sam Raimi version, where Simmons first played the blowhard in 2002 . Still, if viewers “want to equate that with their specific talking head in the media somewhere that they feel I’m channeling,” Simmons says, cheekily, “well, you know, feel free to do that.”
Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson in Spider-Man.
Though, in the annals of Oscar history, Simmons’ most enduring character remains a muscled Terence Fletcher, the bandleader in 2014’s Whiplash. Fletcher is no Schillinger, but one can see the same brimming rage in the performance. As with Schillinger, Simmons wondered if his portrayal might color his future work. (He half-jokes about its effect on his Farmers Insurance ads: “I was concerned about when we were getting all the attention for Whiplash. And I was like, do you want to be affiliated with this, you know, abusive dude, spewing profanities all the time?”) Instead, the opposite occurred. Simmons calls it the “Whiplash bump”: everyone wanted him.
For Simmons, the recognition couldn’t have come at a better time. Materially, the role was a success; it bumped Simmons up every casting director’s wish list, still, to this day. But psychologically, winning the Oscar—an award he never cared for, never thought he’d ever be in contention for—changed nothing.
“I mean, I was 59 years old,” Simmons says. “If that had happened when I was 19—” he pauses.
“Fortunately, I had enough ups and downs in my personal life, in my career, I felt like I was a reasonably solid human being. And as enjoyable and obviously gratifying as that whole process was—I mean, every time I turn around, I’m on a red carpet somewhere and somebody’s handing me a trophy, and I’m making a speech—I didn’t see that as, this is the culmination of my career.”
Even in Oz, when he gave his first major screen performance, when he looked around at the 19-year-olds who had already arrived, who would never slouch up 9th avenue selling beers—even then—Simmons only felt thankful.
“I didn’t have a chip on my shoulder at all,” he remembers. “And I didn’t feel like I had anything to prove. I was just excited at the opportunity to begin that transition.”
Simmons was just happy to cross the line.
ONE MORE scene in the life of J.K. Simmons. He is here. He has returned to New York, over a year later.
Simmons had driven 31 hours that March day before stopping in Albuquerque for the night—then home to L.A. the next day. Ben never contracted the virus. It left the family unscathed, but not unchanged. Simmons feels tremendous gratitude for having been able to leave, for having spent the last year with his family, to have kept them safe when so many others could not.
Last night, Simmons and Ben had dinner. It was late, 10 P.M., that typical New York dinner time when the restaurants throng. And the people were out this time, the city beginning to wake up again, the theaters reopening, the glory coming back.
Simmons thinks now about what he said, as a football coach—maybe not unlike another football coach, who once kicked him in the ass and walked across his chest. He thinks about the speech, when he said, “Forty years ago, I was you, men: magnificent.” Or when he added, “What I wouldn’t give to be you, men.”
Would he do it—would Simmons go back? Back to when he was young and rootless, to when he was magnificent. His answer is more complicated.
“I continue to look back on those days, whether it’s summer theater in Montana, regional theater, Broadway in New York, or my early days on Oz,” Simmons begins. “I’m the same guy, you know.”
“I’m thinking now. I did a wonderful off-Broadway musical in the late 80s, called Birds of Paradise. And it’s basically about a little amateur community theater troupe. One [member], my [character’s] brother, is a successful actor who’s been in a couple of Broadway shows and some commercials—you know, hit the big time. And he comes to visit and gives us the benefit of his wisdom. His main point: [Forget about] having the stars in your eyes, wanting to be on Broadway, wanting to be on television or film. He goes: Just enjoy the process. He did use the word ‘struggle,’ as I recall. ‘This struggle that you have here, trying to make a piece of theatrical art together, this is the sweetest part. This is what it’s all about.’”
J.K. Simmons is the same guy because the process is the same process—because when you fall in love with the thing and not the man you are when you do the thing, you have made it, forever. You must do this. You must treat every line you cross not as an ascent to some goal, but as a journey to a new place. You must have no expectations. You must think of greatness as that which is always ahead of you—always within reach.