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A FRESH LOOK AT HOME ENTERTAINMENT
YOU CAN’T RUN FOREVER STAR J.K. SIMMONS ON AN OSCAR-WINNING CAREER OF KILLERS, HARD CASES AND NEWSPAPER EDITORS
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?
She didn’t say that last sentence, about me being the only guy. I was the only husband she was considering for the part. It was not unlike her previous film, I’m Not Here, in which she came to me and said, “I want you to play a pathetic, miserable, regretful, emaciated drunk who doesn’t speak a word in the entire movie.” This time, at least I had dialogue and interaction with other humans. But it was a pleasure, and a stretch to get to play somebody this outside the norm.
His first words, when asked why he’s just done something heinous, are, “Does it matter?” Did that give you an insight into him?
Absolutely. And there was actually much discussion of how to phrase that idea. We tossed around the idea of saying, “Why not?”, but that just seemed a little less impactful and more flippant and dismissive. But that awful nihilistic, nothing-to-lose, as you said, psychopathic mentality is scary.
What’s it like being directed by your wife in scenes like that, or scenes where you pleasure yourself while sitting next to a corpse? That’s something you’ve never done before.
Let’s not rush to any assumptions. (Laughs) Of course, the short, flippant answer is that it’s just like life at home. I do as directed. But it’s absolutely brilliant being directed by Michelle. And it was a fully family affair because our daughter Olivia plays the stepdaughter of Fernanda Urrejola’s character, and our son Joe did the entire score and post-production sound effects
