J. K. Simmons Quotes
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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 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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I do respond well to a director, a teacher - someone who doesn't accept mediocrity.
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In lean times, you get plenty of sleep, and you're not flying around everywhere.
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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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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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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 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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Being evil is easy.
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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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Screaming is hard after a while.
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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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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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Good material is good material.
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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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I like to act. Every other aspect of show business I find uninteresting.
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I do think you need to understand a character's motivation and perspective.
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I don't think I've ever watched a movie to prepare for a role.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 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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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.