Like so many New Yorkers, Jonathan Kimble Simmons was born elsewhere, but this is home.And like so many New York actors, J.K.
Simmons once waited tables at the legendary restaurant Joe Allen.Was he a good waiter? "You know what? Not very good," he said."I worked hard.
I was pleasant, you know.I tried to be charming.
I was not organized.This would have taken me, like, five trips to set up [this table], yeah.
And the butter would already be melting by the time I got it here." Simmons, who's a far better actor than waiter, stars in "The Westies," a new series out next week on MGM+.It's about the Irish-American mobsters who ruled the West Side of New York in the 1980s.
Simmons plays the boss, who is tough, smart, and bad to the bone.How comfortable is he playing that kind of bad guy? "I just love going back and forth and doing something different from whatever I just got done doing," he said."And if there's something I can latch onto other than just pure evil, you know, if I can find the humanity in the guy somewhere, then, yeah, I love playing those kind of guys."To watch a trailer for "The Westies" click on the video player below: Simmons spent years playing "those kind of guys," and more, like the bombastic boss in the "Spider-man" series, and the guy in those Farmers Insurance ads.
At 71, he says that for most of his career he played characters older than he actually is, and – as a married father of two – that carried into real life."We didn't get married until I was 41, and Joe was born when I was 43," he said.
"I would, you know, have him in the Baby Bjorn or whatever at the grocery store when he was, like, six months or whatever, and the checkout lady would say, 'Oh, you've got the grandson today.' Like, and I'd go ….'Sure.'"He wasn't necessarily grandfatherly in 2015's "Whiplash," playing the brutal band leader opposite Miles Teller.
The film was shot in only 19 days, and Simmons says it was intense – but only when the cameras were rolling.In...