JK Simmons: 'I still get emotional – how could the universe be so unfair?'
JK Simmons knows there was an irony in winning the Oscar for best supporting actor, which he did three years ago for playing the bullying jazz teacher in Whiplash. It was only after 30 years of buttressing other people’s stories – from playing the father of a pregnant teenager in Juno to chomping cigars as Peter Parker’s editor-in-chief in SpiderMan – that the newly crowned character actor got bumped up to a leading role.
Or really, twin lead roles in the case of his byzantine TV thriller Counterpart, where Simmons takes centre stage as Howard Alpha and Howard Prime, a pair of clones forged in the last years of the cold war when East German scientists accidentally created a parallel Earth. Imagine Checkpoint Charlie was a mirror. And then imagine that the people on the other side, sour with three decades of resentment, were training spies to murder and secretly supplant their twins.
“Sometimes I need to make sure that I’m not just being chickenshit and shying away from something challenging,” says Simmons on a bright and chilly afternoon in Los Angeles. “That’s part of the joy of what I do, that I don’t have to do the same thing over and over again. I don’t want to get in that rut of, ‘Oh, this is not a JK Simmons part because it’s not, like, right in my wheelhouse.’”
For an onscreen chameleon, in person Simmons is still a midwesterner with a firm sense of self. He’s intimidating in the way of a man who expects his favourite diner counter stool to be available whenever he walks in, yet seems without fuss and ego. The internet flipped recently over photos of Simmons hoisting barbells with arms that could have been bolted on from a GI Joe figure – but the 63-year-old is not indestructible. He admits that, when he was invited to be Mardi Gras’s King of Bacchus in New Orleans in February, he felt the effects of throwing beaded necklaces to revelling crowds. “The whole day you’re going to hospitals and schools and Dixieland bands and throwing your fricking doubloons, and it’s truly a weird move, not like throwing a baseball,” Simmons says. “And then dancing for hours with my wife at the ball afterwards, I was physically a wreck for a solid week after that.”
Of course, deep down he doesn’t mind. When you’ve spent decades trying to add depth to kindly dads and stoic cops, you say yes to a new adventure. When Simmons read the script for Counterpart’s first episode, he had no idea that on page 20, pencil-pusher Howard Alpha, a mid-level nobody at the United Nations in Berlin, would be introduced to his gunslinging reflection, Howard Prime. Alpha is shocked. Blinking and wheezing, he turns to his colleagues like a dog trying to decipher a magic trick.
Simmons was shocked, too. Not just at the plot twist, which, he sighs, “audiences don’t get to experience” because it’s given away in the trailer. But also because his star part was splintering into something even better: a serious acting challenge. The two Howards are exact doppelgangers. Life on either side of the Crossroads has forged their personalities into opposites: one soft, one harsh. The show’s creator, Justin Marks, abandoned an idea that Howard Prime would have dingy teeth thanks to an inferior dentist, so Simmons – “more of an inside-out actor than an outside-in” – had to help audiences distinguish them without a handy facial scar or evil-Captain-Kirk moustache.
“That would have made it a lot easier, wouldn’t it?” groans Simmons in mock exhaustion. As Prime, Simmons’ back is straighter and his smile more wolfish. Fans of Counterpart’s tricky first season sometimes tell him they can pinpoint Prime by the look in his eyes. He takes the compliment, but in the show’s second season, he may stop hearing it as the two Howards start becoming more alike. The job keeps mutating. First, Simmons had to make them distinct. Then he had to make them play-act each other as a ruse. Now, they’re adopting their alter ego’s character traits. It’s even more complicated to embody than to describe. “It’s this extra level that they really are not just pretending to be each other, but accessing within themselves aspects that they attribute more to their counterpart,” explains Simmons, with the patience of a calculus professor.
Simmons couldn’t have formulated a better Oscar follow-up. One of the joys of the show is that it could pass for a supercut of every JK bit-character. In an hour, he can be the doting husband, the cynical bureaucrat and the kind of killer who could decapitate someone with a cymbal. His Oscar has earned him more on-set input. “Even in ADR [where dialogue is redubbed] I make the post-sound guy really crazy,” says Simmons. “This has definitely been the most that I have been involved in creatively, start to finish. Largely, that just comes with being number one on the call-sheet. People will listen to you.”
There has been a half-century from Simmons joining the high-school drama club in Worthington, Ohio to complete career control. “At that time at my school, you were one of the brainy nerds, you were a jock, you were a hippie, or you were a thug. And if you didn’t belong to one of those, you were shit out of luck,” he says. When, at 15, weak knees cut short his dreams of being a football player – and therefore a jock – Simmons decided to be a hippie artist. Just like Howards Alpha and Prime, he consciously swapped identities. “At first I resisted, but then it started to make sense – the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement – plus, there were really cute girls who were hippies.”
In college, Simmons studied music – “I still have fantasies of singing the Brahms Requiem with the Berlin Philharmonic,” he smiles, “even though my pipes couldn’t pull it off any more.” He gravitated toward Brahms, Beethoven and Schubert – which should have stood him in good stead for wrapping his tongue around Counterpart’s snippets of German. “The good news/ bad news is I can actually speak it well enough to sound like I speak it really well,” says Simmons, without the tremor of a brag. “But when I’m having an off-camera conversation with the German crew and they start talking back to me, I’m like, ‘I have no idea what you’re saying.’”
Simmons never belted out Wagner arias. However, when he moved to New York in the mid-90s to hunt for theatre work, he did sing in an off-Broadway musical called Das Barbecu. “It was the entire Wagner Ring cycle shrunken into a two-act country-and-western musical,” he chuckles. “It was the mid-90s; everything was ironic.” Still, insists Simmons, “it was actually brilliant”.
Around then, he started to get his first real screen gigs, parts that weren’t just “Sergeant,” or “Patrolman in park”. Barber Dan in an episode of the Nickelodeon show The Adventures of Pete & Pete may not have been a huge role, but it gave him a first name. Besides, Simmons had already learned a major lesson about disappointment. A few years before, he was inthe cast of the Broadway version of A Few Good Men, which hit the stage before the Tom Cruise film, “back when Aaron Sorkin was just some kid from Scarsdale”. Ron Perlman played the Colonel. “What people call the Jack Nicholson role,” says Simmons with a grimace, adding that, for those who did the play, “it’s hard not to be disdainful of the movie”. When Perlman gave his notice, Simmons, who’d understudied the part many times, was certain he’d get the promotion that would make him a star.
“There was nobody on the planet, no other actor, that was more the right guy for that role at that production,” says Simmons. “It’s still to this day one of the five best parts I ever had that were the right marriage at the right time, right up there with Whiplash.” But the producers went with a famous name. Simmons was crushed – “I still get emotional about it; how could the universe be so unfair?” – and realised he couldn’t spend his life watching someone else step into his destiny. So he changed course and quit the show to play another officer, Captain Hook, in a touring revival of Peter Pan. Two months later, the show hired a new Tiger Lily named Michelle Schumacher, and that is how Simmons met his wife.
“A pivotal moment, this devastating, horrible thing happened that led to the best thing in my life – that led to my life, my family,” says Simmons, with audible relief. “If the right thing had happened in that scenario, I wouldn’t have kids.”
Life-altering moments such as these are what viewers are left to reflect on throughout Counterpart. It’s drama that examines the detours and hurdles that shape a person. Or, for Howard, two people. “How much of it is how you are raised?” he muses, “and how much of it is how shit happens to you that is not how your parents intended to raise you, and is outside of anyone’s control?”
From his dodgy knees to the chance encounter with his wife, fate has often taken control of Simmons’ life. But now that he’s number one on the call sheet, he’s finally in charge.
• Counterpart’s second season is available on Starzplay on Amazon Prime.
This devastating, horrible thing happened that led to the best thing in my life