J. K. Simmons Quotes
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I never had intention of coming to New York or L.A. and actually doing more than scraping by - you know, doing plays. And as my career sort of progressed of its own volition, I did come to New York.
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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.
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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.
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I do respond well to a director, a teacher - someone who doesn't accept mediocrity.
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I did Broadway shows. And I started realizing that this is actually how I'm going to make my living. So maybe I should try to do television and film and make a better living and get an occasional residual check so I can pay a mortgage someday.
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Being evil is easy.
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I like to act. Every other aspect of show business I find uninteresting.
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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.
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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.
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In lean times, you get plenty of sleep, and you're not flying around everywhere.
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I was studying music in college. I was singing, I was doing operas and Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, and then I was offered a job as the music director of the Bigfork Summer Playhouse, in Bigfork, Montana.
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I was in New York. I had been doing theater for many years, and then I got hired to a little part - they weren't calling it an extra, but I didn't have lines. It was a 'featured' part.
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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.
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I've gone back and forth with fine-tuning the kind of conditioning I'm doing. Sometimes trying to shed weight and getting leaner and sometimes trying to pack on a little more muscle.
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Screaming is hard after a while.
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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.
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Good material is good material.
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When I go back to New York all these years later, I'll walk down Seventh Avenue, and I'll hear, 'Yo, Oz!' In New York, I get recognized for that all the time.
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I do think you need to understand a character's motivation and perspective.
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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.
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I wasn't a comic book aficionado at all when I was a kid, but my cousin Weed was. Every time we went to visit him on the farm, he had two really fun things: comedy albums and comic books.
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I don't think I've ever watched a movie to prepare for a role.
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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.
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I have a degree in music, yeah, from the University of Montana. I studied voice and composition and conducting and all that.