It's May in Cannes and an enthralled capacity crowd leaps to its feet as the final credits roll on Whiplash. They turn towards the young director, Damien Chazelle, and its veteran star, JK Simmons, who are seated among the throng. The crowd clap, cheer, hoot and holler. And they don't stop. Some 15 minutes into the standing ovation, the talent is escorted through the noise and away from the cinema. How else will they get everyone else to shut up and leave?
Whiplash, an electrifying depiction of a young jazz drumming protege (Miles Teller) and his hilariously sadistic maestro (Simmons), has received similar receptions elsewhere, taking home a brace of awards from Sundance (including the Audience Prize) and numerous critics circle awards.
Fast-forward six months and JK Simmons is due back on applause duty, this time at the London Film Festival. For the moment, however, he has more pressing things on his mind: how to record tonight’s Detroit Tigers game from across the Atlantic.
“It won’t start until 10 here,” he whispers. “I’ll just blow off the premiere party and go watch the game.”
As it turns out, that's a very JK Simmons thing to say. A self-confessed "showbiz nincompoop", he seldom watches movies ("except on planes") or television: "Unless there's baseball. Oh. My wife and daughter watch The Voice. So I hear parts of that."
Theatrical pedigree
Fame came relatively late for the 59-year-old, who had a long career behind him when he first essayed J Jonah Jameson in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man sequence.
Born in Detroit to a college professor and a college administrator, Simmons was raised in and around the campuses of Columbus, Ohio and Missoula, Montana. His brother is a musician and his sister lectures at the University of Washington. The siblings’ professions have a lot in common, he suspects.
“We’re all on stages,” he notes. “You know, after I left college and moved away, I went home to visit and my father was teaching a class at the University of Montana. And I snuck in at the back of the music recital hall, because it was a popular class and they had to move it in there. And I realised this is a charismatic guy up there. He knows his stuff. He’s prepared. He’s inspiring. And he has incredible stage presence. No wonder this class is a hit.”
After graduation, Simmons spent a decade in regional theatre before making it big on Broadway.
"It was a quick 20-year process," the actor says laughing. "My first job was in musical theatre at a Summer Playhouse and it was exactly 20 years later we started shooting Oz, which was my first real, long-term screen job."
For several years, Simmons double-jobbed between the role of neo-Nazi Vernon Schillinger on the HBO prison drama series Oz, and Law & Order, where he found a residency as the psychiatrist Dr Emil Skoda.
“I was fortunate there,” he says. “Because when I started playing Vernon, I was worried that’s how everyone would see me. I’d get stuck playing that character all the time. I’d be that guy.”
Hmm. Not really the guy anyone would want to be.
“I actually had to work on that,” he says. “He was a despicable character and I had to work on dropping the role and picking it back up. I didn’t want to take that home to the family.”
Television soon catapulted Simmons toward the movie- verse, where, it transpires, directors love him. He’s worked with the Coen brothers twice, with Sam Raimi five times, and has appeared in every one of Jason Reitman’s films to date. That film-maker has called Simmons “the one actor who speaks my voice”.
"I'm so bad at this that I didn't know who he was when I first met him," recalls Simmons. "I didn't know his dad was Ivan Reitman [director of Twins and Ghostbusters, among others]. I'm not sure I knew who Ivan Reitman was. So even though I'm old enough to be his father, the roles are reversed. He grew up in showbusiness. He knows everything. And he's one of those smart guys. I invited him into my poker group and he had never played. Which was awesome. Six months later, he's the best player there."
It was at one of Simmons's poker get-togethers that Reitman the Younger passed him the script for Juno, and, five years later, Damien Chazelle's script for Whiplash.
“I knew it was special right from the beginning,” says Simmons. “Not just because I have great affection and respect for Jason. But because as soon as I read it, I just wanted to be that guy.”
"That guy" is Whiplash's Fletcher, the terrifying, bellowing tutor to Miles Teller's Buddy Rich-wannabe. It helps Simmons' cause that the movie is a kind of perfect storm: relentless bone-shaking music, sparkling cruel banter and a tremendous acting two-step with Teller. But it's Simmons who is tipped for Oscar glory.
Has he tired of hearing the words Oscar buzz yet? “No way. Not a chance.”
Subgenre subversion
In the grander swell of awards season, Whiplash is the little movie that could. Made for the minuscule sum of $3.3 million, Damien Chazelle's brilliant subversion of the master-protege subgenre was shot in 19 days. It ought to have felt like a pressure cooker. But Simmons swears the contrary is true.
“Damien just had everything so well prepared,” he says. “Everything was storyboarded. Everything was prepared. It gave the actors the freedom to play. As soon as we heard ‘cut’, me and Miles would start goofing around. It was a very light-hearted shoot.”
Given the volume of Simmons’s bully-boy teacher, that must have required a lot of honey. “Oh yeah,” he says. “Honey and lemon in the tea. Damien was really clever and gave me a day between the scenes where I really lose it, so I could vocally recover. There was no saving anything. I had to forget everything I knew about vocal technique. I had to forget technique altogether. Everything I’ve learned over the years. I had to just lose my shit.”
Mission accomplished.
Whiplash opens next week
