J.K. Simmons
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.Collection: Teen
With these big superhero movies, everybody is so tight-lipped about everything, there's a certain amount of just going on faith.Collection: Movies
Most of my friends - when I was five, six, seven years old - their dads were working in an auto plant in Detroit until 5:30, and then they were sat in rush hour. They weren't around as much. My dad finished at three o'clock, so he was just around more.Collection: Dad
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.Collection: Relationship
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'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.
I don't think I've ever watched a movie to prepare for a role.
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.
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.
For me, the lean times were a wonderful, beautiful time of my life, struggling for many years in regional theater all over the country for not much money.
It's nice to be number one on the call sheet.
Good material is good material.
Music has become so ever-present in our lives. You can't walk through a shopping mall or go into a restaurant without what we used to call Muzak.
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.
If I see a now-28-year-old woman coming up to me, she's probably thinking of 'Juno' because she watched it with her parents when she was 18 years old.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'd always had the concern that being in commercials would affect my credibility when I was getting started as a TV and film actor.
My aunt was so attuned to commercials that she could always identify the voiceover actor.
It's OK to turn down stuff that isn't really interesting and spend the summer with my family.
I like to stay home. I don't want to be away shooting in Europe for six or eight months at a stretch.
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.
Education is very important to me.
I don't respond to authority figures who abuse their authority.
I do respond well to a director, a teacher - someone who doesn't accept mediocrity.
I would like to thank the 49 actors who appear on screen in 'Whiplash' for realizing Damien Chazelle's vision so beautifully.
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 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.
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.
I've always believed, maybe naively, that 'The play's the thing.'
Maybe when my kids are grown up, I can go back to Broadway. It would be great someday, I suppose.
I want to be like Bradley Cooper when I grow up.
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 read 'Whiplash,' and I wanted to do it.
Things heal. Bad stuff happens, but you go on. Life takes care of it.
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.
In lean times, you get plenty of sleep, and you're not flying around everywhere.
You can't play a guy who's just a snake, because what do you draw on?
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.
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.
Teaching is in my blood.
Music to me was never something that I could listen to while reading a book. Especially when I was studying music, if I was going to listen to music, I was going to put on the headphones or crank the stereo, and by God, I was going to sit there and just listen to music. I wasn't going to talk on the phone and multitask, which I can't do anyway.
We're raising a generation of kids who are being overly praised for incredibly minor accomplishments. I think it's counter-productive.
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 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.
I like to act. Every other aspect of show business I find uninteresting.
People evolve and it's important to not stop evolving just because you've reached 'adulthood.'
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.