By: Daniel Schweiger

From the Coen brothers’ most celebrated comedies like O Brother, Where Art Thou? to such unsung ones as The Hudsucker Proxy and Intolerable Cruelty, the black-humored brothers delight in banging out rapid-fire patter that would fit the cadence of any great 1930s character actor. With his resonant big-country voice and sharp-edged looks, J.K. Simmons’s previous work has often recalled that golden age sensibility, whether it’s been his blustering call as J. Jonan Jameson in three Spider-Man movies, or as an inept special effects man who’s constantly on the run in the Coens’ Ladykillers.

Now fans of Joel and Ethan’s comedies of murderous errors will be delighted with the screwball zing they’ve put into Burn After Reading, a hilarious combo of Fargo’s body count with a sharp Cold War satire that would be right at home on the couch of The President’s Analyst…except here, the spies don’t really care about the explosive Russkie information, and the CIA supervisor dispenses his orders with the enthusiasm of a guy getting a cappuccino in Starbucks. That “spook” here is none other than J.K. Simmons, giving an even more wonderfully blasé performance than he delivered as the dad of the preggers Juno.

It’s Simmons’s underplaying at receiving the “shocking” information that’s a masterpiece of the straight-laced take, making his two scenes in Burn After Reading the punch-line to the “spy” mayhem that has preceded it. With a cast like John Malkovich, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Frances McDormand playing the goofballs caught in a web of catastrophic greed and misunderstanding that come for a spook’s stolen memoirs, J.K. Simmons’s ability to literally sit away with the film is a testament to the actor’s satiric talents.

Hailing from Detroit, Simmons started off as an aspiring composer and singer at the University of Montana, quickly finding another career path as an actor through numerous appearances in summer stock musicals. Simmons’s initial film and television forays would often find him as sporting and authority figures in The Ref, The Scout, The First Wives Club, The Jackal, and Homicide: Life on the Street. While Simmons would be lucky enough to become a favorite of Sam Raimi on such films as For the Love of the Game, The Gift, and the continuing adventures of Spider-Man, it would be through such television series as Oz, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and the ongoing Closer where Simmons would truly rise to public attention, his episodic work as a prisoner, a doctor, and an assistant police chief showing an authoritative presence that could be psychotic, humorous, stentorian and, above all, human.

Now J.K. Simmons’s turns in everything from American Dad and Postal, to Rendition and Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee has made him one of the busiest and most prolific character actors in Hollywood. The actor’s talent for ensemble work gets what might be its briefest and best workout for Burn After Reading. It’s a role that puts a new hilarious spin on listening to Irving the Explainer, a much-derided character intent on telling you everything you’ve just seen. Leave it to Simmons to have fun with the Coens’ goof on bad screenwriting, for in his second go-around for the brothers’ wonderfully black-hearted look at human nature, Simmons sums up the chaos with an underplayed wink that would even crack a smile on Anton Chigurh’s face.

Daniel Schweiger: In Burn After Reading, you might have the two most pivotal movie scenes since Beatrice Straight won an Oscar for Network. How do you make the most of that screen time, especially in a star-driven ensemble like this one?

J.K. Simmons: Well, it might sound old-fashioned and simplistic, but I just try to take the words off the page and obey the old Shakespeare mantra that “The play’s the thing,” especially when it comes to screenplays that are associated with people like Joel and Ethan Coen, Diablo Cody, and Jason Reitman. Burn After Reading was truly one of the funniest scripts I’ve ever, ever read. It certainly has to be the best thing anyone’s ever written for John Malkovich. And when it came to my scenes with David Rasche, all we had to do was try not to screw our words up. We ended up knocking our two scenes out in two days.

DS: The performances are very stylized in Burn After Reading, yet you’re completely straight-laced in it, which is why your scenes are particularly hilarious.

JKS: That’s true of this movie, unlike the character I played in The Ladykillers, which was the first film I ever did for the Coen brothers. Garth Pancake was way, way out there. In fact, they were pulling the reigns on me in that one, because I wanted to go even more over-the-top with Garth. But in Burn, I thought it was all about being the straight-man — “the buck-stops-here” guy. He has the attempted voice of sanity, reason, and intelligence.

DS: The charm of the CIA Superior really is “less is more.”

JKS: There are certainly exceptions to that in my filmography, I guess. But when in doubt, that’s where I go. Unless it’s something specific like playing J. Jonah Jameson in Spider-Man, where you’re trying to capture that comic book vibe, I always just try to make it real.

DS: Even though you’ve certainly played your share of authority figures, did you do any research for this guy?

JKS: No, I didn’t at all. I just sat there and said the words. I didn’t get out of my chair once during the movie, now that I think about it. But I do like to do research when I have time and when it seems cogent. But if it’s playing the shrink on Law and Order, or if it’s anything that the Coen brothers or The Closer’s James Duff write, then I figure the research has already been done for me.

DS: I imagine the Russian spy stuff was irrelevant when Burn After Reading was shot. Now it looks like it’s getting relevant very quickly. Do you think the Cold War is coming back?

JKS: Like everyone else, I hope not. It’s a little scary. The same kind of ironic thing happened on The Ladykillers. When we were shooting it, I’d never heard of Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Then, when the movie came out, all of a sudden I saw commercials all over TV for IBS, saying it was a serious disease. And I thought, “Oh great.” Because in Ladykillers, it’s a funny disease! So this is a much larger scale — a more tragic version of life imitating art, and the small side effect of all the horror that’s going on in Georgia is that it makes our movie one-tenth of a percent less funny.

DS: In its way, Burn After Reading is similar to The Ladykillers, where odd characters are doing dastardly things to each other in pursuit of riches. While I personally loved The Ladykillers, that film still didn’t do what it should have.

JKS: I still don’t understand why The Ladykillers didn’t do better. I don’t pay a lot of attention to the showbiz media, but it seemed, at the time, that there was a Tom Hanks backlash going on. He’d just won a couple of Oscars, and the next movie he had come out after The Ladykillers was The Terminal, which also wasn’t well-received. So I think people sort of treated Ladykillers like it was supposed to be another Tom Hanks blockbuster. They wanted to find something they didn’t like about Tom Hanks — I don’t know how anyone could do that. This wasn’t a “Tom Hanks movie.” It didn’t aspire to be a blockbuster. It was a Coen brothers comedy. We all went out on different, stupid, big limbs for that movie. Tom was one of the guys doing his thing, and he was hilarious in it. We all had a great time making The Ladykillers. I laughed every day in my trailer as I read the script sides. I thought, “This is going to kill. This is going to be better than Fargo.” A lot of times, you do a film with those high hopes. It comes out and you say, “Ahhh, well, yeah. I can see why it’s not doing great.” But The Ladykillers is one of the few films I’ve been in that didn’t do great for reasons I can’t understand. I thought it was really hilarious.

DS: Especially when Garth keeps talking about his fiancé, “Mountain Girl”…

JKS: I still have people coming up to me with that, and of course they get it wrong half the time. A clerk in a store or some random guy in a restaurant will say, “Hey, how’s Mountain Woman?” Or “How’s Mountain Water?”

DS: How did you end up being cast as this company man?

JKS: Ethan and Joel are very specific about everything, and that includes casting. I first auditioned for them for a bunch of different roles in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and they ended up wanting to cast me in a role that I wasn’t interested in doing. For The Ladykillers, I think I auditioned four times for the same part, but I wasn’t who they envisioned for Garth, whom they saw as a big, bearded guy like Grizzly Adams, yet I ended up getting it. When it came to Burn After Reading, the Coens sent me the script, which had a couple of parts I thought were interesting. I even put myself on tape for a different part than what I ended up getting. The brothers just said, “We love you, but we don’t think you’re right for it.” Then I did the same thing for Mr. Bigwig, whom the Coens saw as a 70-year-old guy, but I kept at it until I read for the part in person. It was all very friendly. They were laughing. Then Joel and Ethan looked at each other until Joel turned to me and said, “Well, Goddamit. That’s exactly right! Okay. All right. Good. Yeah. You’re not what we’re looking for, but we’ll take you.” So the CIA Supervisor became 20 years younger than what they were thinking.

DS: You have the ultimate “Irving the Explainer” part here for the climax. In a way, it’s similar to the “non-ending” of No Country for Old Men, but I think here it’s a lot more dramatically effective at providing a sense of “closure,” and certainly far more humorous in how you tie the characters together.

JKS: I’m not dying to do a lot of two-scene parts in movies at this stage in my career, but when something like this comes along, you do it. These are two great scenes that are written by the fabulous Coens, and that last scene really brings everything together. Hopefully, the laughs that come in that scene are payoffs for the laughs that Brad, George, and Fran have all been working for. And it’s David Rasche and I who get to cash the jokes in! The brilliance of Burn’s script is what is unseen, and I think the way that our characters refer to it, the film’s events make it two of the all-time best scenes in a Coen brothers film.

DS: You really get the sense of the Coens letting it all hang out with their direction here. I can only imagine how much fun it was to be part of Burn After Reading.

JKS: The Coens are very low-key, so it’s not like you’re laughing your ass off all day every day, like you sometimes have on a comedy with a bunch of attention-starved comic actors. Yet making a movie with the Coens is like the ultimate ride. They’ve been doing this for a while so they’re really organized, right from the start. When the Coens finally decided to use me, they called up in July and told me my shooting dates would be October 2nd and 5th. Almost always in that situation, you and your agent have a nice laugh because you know it’s going to change four or five times. But with the Coen brothers, you know the most the schedule might change is that you’ll shoot on October 1st and 4th!

DS: Have you ever gotten to meet the Coens’ thus far unseen editor, Roderick James?

JKS: I have never gotten to meet him — the mysterious Roderick James. He’s reclusive!

DS: You now seem to be as embedded in the Coens’ stock company as you are with Sam Raimi’s. What does it take to become part of a repertory “company” like these filmmakers have?

JKS: You just need to get on the same page with somebody. It either happens or it doesn’t, but I don’t make any big adjustments in the way I approach material because it’s Joel, Ethan, Sam or Jason Reitman. I just try to read it and do it. Again, it’s back to “the play’s the thing” and not getting in the way. Sam Raimi lived in a hovel of a tenement in downtown Manhattan with Joel decades ago, yet they have very, very different ways of working. Joel and Ethan are so specific. I kept trying to change one expletive in Burn After Reading to a slightly different version of it, and they were like, “Nah. No. Say it the way we wrote it.” It’s like their writing is Shakespearean. You don’t want to mess with the words because they’re so specific. And on the rare occasions where I think, “Oh, this would be better…” it ain’t. I’ve done five movies with Sam Raimi, and with every one, 25 to 30% of what I’m doing is improvised, either by me or by the both of us. It’s like in For the Love of the Game, where Sam would turn the camera to me and say, “He just got a strike. He just threw a ball. He’s rounding third,” to get my reactions. So while Sam knows what he’s doing, there’s lots of room for improvisation. But with the Coens, they’re so specific that the room for improv doesn’t exist…and it’s unnecessary in their films to begin with.

DS: Your IMDB page says that you started out wanting to be a composer before you fell into acting.

JKS: If I had a vague goal in mind when I was 22, it would have been to become the next Leonard Bernstein. I was in Montana studying music, falling in love with Brahms and all those old dead guys. That was my passion. I was also composing and singing when I stumbled from opera into musical theater and then summer stock. And when I started doing theater, I fell in love with it without ever having the inkling that I’d be in television or film in any capacity. I thought, “Gosh, if I could make a living doing plays for $300 a week, then that would be cool.” What did I care? I was single and stupid, without any responsibilities. But one thing led to another in a series of lucky breaks and being able to work with a lot of great writers and directors on my way up. So it wasn’t like I was a natural genius actor when I first played Tommy Albright in Brigadoon at the Bigfork Summer playhouse in Bigfork, Montana, where I went this past weekend for the 29th annual Townies vs. Playhouse softball game.

DS: One of your big recent hits was Juno…but what amazed me was when I watched a YouTube parody called Jewno – and there you were playing the same part!

JKS: As the old fart I’m becoming, it’s fun to do some real guerilla films like Juno just to stay a little bit in touch with the cutting edge. And here’s how that hooked up. I had worked for years for Tom Fontana in New York doing Oz. Tom’s a great guy and a great friend, and him and this guy named Stephen J. Levinson were the two strike captains for The Writer’s Guild. Stephen told Tom about this parody he was working on called Jewno, and Fontana said, “Oh yeah. I know J.K. Simmons. He’s an old pal of mine.” Stephen asked if there was any way I’d do it, and Tom said, “Sure J.K. would! Here’s his number. Check him out.” I literally just happened to be arriving in New York to do a film in Connecticut right around the time they wanted to make Jewno, so I said, “Hey, if you’ll hook me up for one night, then I’ll do it for you.” I thought the script was really, really funny. And after it came out, some people told me the guy in Jewno was a dead ringer for me!

DS: You’ll be appearing in Jennifer’s Body, a horror-comedy that Diablo Cody wrote. What can you tell me about your role?

JKS: I play Mr. Wroblewski, the science teacher. And while I know my filmography says otherwise, I don’t look at characters and say, “What can I do to change my look?” That’s something that happens organically, or it doesn’t. But the way that Diablo wrote him inspired me to go for it. Her screenplay read, “Mr. Wroblewski enters. He moves awkwardly and has a gnarly robotic hand.” So I came up with this whole bizarre backstory on the spot for this guy. I knew I had to have the robotic hand, which was brilliant. He’s also got a burn scar and a bad Art Garfunkle hairpiece. It’s not like I don’t look like me because it’s pretty hard to disguise my mug, and with the wig, the arm, the limp, the glasses, and the wardrobe, it’s a character that seems to be all about the exterior. But inside, he’s got a heart of gold. Wroblewski’s stuck in the ‘70s and trying to be “the cool teacher” that the kids really dig. And, of course, he’s a complete dork and an object of scorn and ridicule, yet he’s just a sweetheart of a guy who sees his own tragic past as connecting with the whole, horrible, demonic tragedy that’s going on with his possessed student.

DS: You’re now shooting a new season of The Closer. What’s ahead for assistant police chief Will Pope?

JKS: More of the same — bureaucracy and underlings who don’t listen to me.

DS: Having done so many amazing television shows, how does The Closer stand out for you?

JKS: My three sort of “regular” jobs that I’ve had on TV series, The Closer, Oz, and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, all have good writing in common, just like the movies I’m proud of. I did a series that James Duff wrote called The D.A. five years ago. It got mishandled, as often happens, and didn’t last. So when James came up with the idea for The Closer, he called and told me that he’d written a part for me in it. He asked if I wanted to read the pilot script, but I told him that I didn’t need to. I knew it would be good because I loved the way James wrote. So I think I was the first one on board with The Closer because it took James a long time to go through a list of high-profile actresses before casting Kyra Sedgwick in the lead. It’s the same way that Tom Fontana created Oz and Law and Order, a show that I jumped on halfway through to play the recurring character of Dr. Emil Skoda. One of the things that was especially interesting about Will Pope in The Closer is that he’s a 50-year-old bald, white guy who has a libido. That’s a whole other side to a character like this — one that you don’t get to do on television unless you’re the handsome 19-year-old guy. Another unique facet to Will is that he’s an authority figure who’s in the middle of trying to please his superiors and also trying to do the right thing by Brenda and her squad. He’s always choosing which battles to fight, and that’s complicated by their past personal relationship. All of these things make it interesting to keep doing The Closer on a day-to-day basis. That can get to be a grind on most series, yet it doesn’t happen here because the writing’s so interesting — that and the fact that we do 15 episodes a year instead of 22 or 24. Friends who are regulars on series like that hate their lives because it’s work, work, work, work, work, and it’s the same thing every week. But I have a really nice situation on The Closer, especially because I only work two or three days a week. The rest of the time I coach baseball, hang out with my family, and mix a film in here and there.

DS: The Spider-Man films look likely to continue, with or without Sam Raimi directing them. How do you hope to see J. Jonah Jameson’s character develop in the sequels?

JKS: I hope J. Jonah Jameson stays as he is. People ask me when I’ll have a much larger part and become a super bad guy like Jonah did in the comic books, but I think being the comic relief, the guy that they cut to four or five times as he’s screaming, yelling, and being the hotheaded idiot that he is, I think that’s perfect. I hope that Sam keeps directing them. And if he doesn’t, I’m told that he’ll be an integral part of the Spider-Man films to come. He’s not going to abandon the franchise. He’ll have his hands in them as a producer, from the writing of the script to the end of postproduction. But I don’t have any grand aspirations for J. Jonah Jameson. Sure, I had more to do in Spider-Man 2 than the first or the last film, and that, to me, was the maximum amount you want of Jameson before he starts to get aggravating.

DS: You have the kind of deep voice and screwball-style comedy energy that reminds me of the wonderful Harve Presnell, a great musical-comedy star who also happened to have a major role in the Coen brothers’ Fargo.

JKS: I haven’t gotten that comparison a lot, but it’s definitely a compliment because I love Harve Presnell. I worked with him in a traveling production of Annie 2: Miss Hannigan’s Revenge, which was a really ill-conceived sequel to Annie. I was Harve’s understudy and played various bit parts. He’s a great guy and a terrific comic actor, especially in Fargo. Harve started out as the big musical star of stage and screen in the 1950s before making that successful transition to comedy, a career path that I’ve followed in my own small way from my start at the Bigfork Summer Playhouse.

DS: Have you ever met an actual CIA “spook”?

JKS: Not that I know of, but then you wouldn’t know if you met one, would you?

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