J.K. Simmons did not appear in a film until he was 39. He did not win an Oscar until he was 60. And for the last 30 years, every time you have heard the Yellow M&M talk in a commercial, that voice has been him.
He grew up wanting to write classical music. He got a music degree from the University of Montana in 1978, spent six summers acting at a small playhouse on a lake in Montana, then eventually drove a broken-down Fiat across the country to New York with $400 in his pocket.
For the next decade he was a musical theater actor, scraping by in regional theaters before finally making it to Broadway in 1990. He played Captain Hook in a Peter Pan revival, a fast-talking hustler in Guys and Dolls, and dozens of smaller stage roles.
His first big break came at age 42. He played a frightening neo-Nazi inmate named Vern Schillinger on Oz, HBO's first hour-long drama series. Five years later he was J. Jonah Jameson, the bellowing flat-topped newspaper editor with the cigar, in the 2002 Spider-Man with Tobey Maguire. He fit the role so completely that whenever Jameson has appeared on the big screen since, in Tobey Maguire's films, in Tom Holland's films, in the animated Spider-Verse, the voice and face have been Simmons. Twenty-four years on, no other actor has ever been cast as Jameson in a Spider-Man movie.
Then came Whiplash in 2014. The whole film was shot in 19 days on a budget of $3.3 million. Simmons played a brutal jazz teacher who breaks his student to try and make him great. The movie made $50 million at the box office, and Simmons walked away with the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. He was 60. Up to that moment, he had spent 30 years on screen as the guy you recognized but couldn't name.
The Oscar did not slow him down. At 61, he hired a personal trainer and started lifting weights, until people on the internet were posting photos of his arms. He also kept showing up everywhere as a voice actor. He played Mayor Lionheart in Zootopia, Kai in Kung Fu Panda 3, and Omni-Man in Amazon Prime's Invincible. He was also Stanford Pines on Disney's Gravity Falls, Tenzin on Nickelodeon's The Legend of Korra, Cave Johnson in the Portal video games, and the main villain in Baldur's Gate 3, which won Game of the Year in 2023. Six films on his resume have been nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars: The Cider House Rules, Juno, Up in the Air, True Grit, Whiplash, and La La Land. And he is still the Yellow M&M.
He turns 72 in January. The work keeps coming.
Deadpool getting rejected from the Avengers is so much funnier when you remember at this point in the timeline the team is just Iron Man, War Machine, and Vision.
I don’t live in the US but a friend who live there just told me about a new version of the American Dream:
- A used Toyota Corolla
- No credit card debt
- A Costco membership
- Being able to pay rent without roommates
Is this real?