I went from being a jock to a hippie. It was a very clear-cut decision. I had to be one or the other. I had to forsake that other aspect of myself. Or thought that I had to, which is regrettable. Quickly, I was back in the pine trees with the hippies, listening to my Jimi Hendrix and my Janis Joplin and turning on, tuning in, and dropping out.
J. K. Simmons
You can't play a guy who's just a snake, because what do you draw on?
When I read the script and saw the jazz music setting, and when I read the name of the filmmaker was Damien Chazelle, I immediately got this mental image of Antoine Fuqua.
I would like to find, or I would like a part to come to me that is like the part that Dennis Franz was fortunate to be able to play on 'NYPD Blue,' a sort of similar-looking actor to me, a generic, bald white guy who you would often think of as playing the authority figure. But he was the disgruntled middle-man. That would be a fun character.
I come from a family of educators. My sister is a college teacher. My dad is a college teacher, but first a junior high teacher.
The first thing I did that was at all in the public eye, other than on stage, was 'Oz,' in which I played the head of the Aryan Brotherhood in a maximum-security prison.
If you're doing a prison show, HBO is the absolute best place in the world to be doing that because you're not going to have to do all that, you know, 'Prison Break' stuff where you can't really behave and speak like people do in a maximum-security prison.
My understanding, from what I've learned so far about Commissioner Gordon, is that he's the older guy with the mustache who relates with our hero in a certain way.
If the awards buzz is happening, and it's coming from critics and people in the business and all of that, that's only more good news.
When I got out of college, I moved to Seattle because it was the nearest big city and still didn't know if I wanted to be a composer, conductor, singer, actor. I just got day jobs and auditioned and took what came, and the theater doors were the ones opening the most.
I never listened to the Grateful Dead as a teen; the only exposure I got was what came through the walls when my sister was listening to them.
I play tons of authority figures, whether it's the dad or the cop or the boss. I think it's a combination of how I look, who I am.
A lot of the stuff about white-supremacist groups was very family-friendly: 'We just love our people.' One the surface, you go, 'Gee, what's wrong with loving your people?' But when you love your people to the exclusion of everything else that's remotely different, that's when you get into trouble.
I read 'Whiplash,' and I wanted to do it.
We all want to not repeat ourselves constantly, and explore the limits of our capabilities.
I just saw 'Men, Women & Children' last night, and it's a devastating movie in a lot of ways, but it's so well done, so well acted.
I'm not a fan of any genre but am a fan of movies that are intelligent and/or funny. That goes across all genres: a horror movie, a zombie movie, alien invaders, chick flick, or raunchy comedy. If it's well done, I'm a fan.
After the second and final time that I got hugely fat in my life and when I lost that weight six or seven years ago, I pretty much decided that I was going to stay in decent shape for the rest of my life.
I've had a contemptuous relationship with authority throughout my life. I found myself at odds with authority, and I'm disdainful of blind authority.
If you are lucky enough to have a parent or two alive on this planet, call them. Don't text; don't e-mail. Call them on the phone.
I don't often do a lot of that kind of research, but when it's something specific like 'Oz' - which I fortunately did not have a lot of experience with - I will. I read 'The Hot House,' about being on the inside at Leavenworth prison.
I don't think I've ever watched a movie to prepare for a role.
Seriously, who doesn't want to slap a 27-year-old movie star?
I've always believed, maybe naively, that 'The play's the thing.'
I'm just glad to be able to work.
There's a kind of numbness, a sameness, a lack of motivation in 'good job' culture.
I would like to thank the 49 actors who appear on screen in 'Whiplash' for realizing Damien Chazelle's vision so beautifully.
On 'Oz' one day, I got a chunk of a camera embedded in my head, and I was passed out on the floor geysering blood while the set medic stood over me, freaking out. No help whatsoever. I ended up going to the ER and getting nine stitches in my head - real Frankenstein stitches.
When we were shooting 'Oz,' my wife was doing 'Beauty and the Beast' on Broadway, singing and dancing. It was an interesting dichotomy in our house.
I don't respond to authority figures who abuse their authority.
My full name's Jonathan Kimble, but my parents didn't want to call me either. So for a while, I went by Kim, which is a name for a girl or a Korean person.
Maybe when my kids are grown up, I can go back to Broadway. It would be great someday, I suppose.
There's another film - a little Greek movie - that hopefully is going to get some distribution here in the U.S., called 'Worlds Apart,' where I also play a 60-year-old guy who looks a lot like J.K. Simmons, who has a romantic relationship with an appropriate woman.
Teaching is in my blood.
I read a very romantic book when I was young, when I was in college: Rilke's 'Letters to a Young Poet.' And I've always felt that if you are in any kind of an artistic, creative endeavor, and you feel there's something else you can do for a living and be happy, I think you should do something else.
My general philosophy of playing bad guys, which I've sort of done, you know, half the time is, you know, very few people who we view as bad guys get out of bed and think, 'What evil, terrible thing am I going to do today?' Most people see their motivations as justified - as, you know, justifying whatever they do.
I've been your yellow M&M for, oh, at least two decades or so, and I've done a lot of other animated stuff in between.
Sometimes I read a really good script, and I just know that it's not a good fit.
For me, if the words are good on the page, the rest of it comes from spending some time with the script, and not like you're learning lines but absorbing what the script has to offer.
I read a lot of scripts, and there's a lot of good writing and a lot of OK writing and a lot of crappy writing. And even with the really good writing, it doesn't necessarily speak to me.
People evolve and it's important to not stop evolving just because you've reached 'adulthood.'
Fortunately, for the first 20 years in my career, I didn't have any other responsibilities outside of myself. I didn't have a wife and kids, so I could afford to sort of barely scrape by, to do theater.
I want to be like Bradley Cooper when I grow up.
By the time I started doing TV and film, I was in my forties, so I wasn't going to do the young up-and-comer.
I actually have a degree in music and was aware that music was a tool used in therapy. I didn't realize how far it had come since I was in college in the mid-seventies.
Whether you need to like a character, I don't think that's necessary in order to portray him.
I had many, many mentors that I worked with. Music teachers, choir directors, directors in summer stock or in regional theater. You know, people I was able to work with repeatedly and learn from who were really sort of appropriate people for me to work with at a given time in my development as an actor.
We're raising a generation of kids who are being overly praised for incredibly minor accomplishments. I think it's counter-productive.
I started out as a singer and a musician, and I was taught that your job is just to get out of the way of Brahms or Arthur Miller or Shakespeare and convey the brilliance that they created.
My overall quest is always to do something that's somehow different from whatever it is that I just got done doing. If that can include occasionally playing an older guy who has a romantic side and a romantic relationship, than that's a real treat.
