“It became what it became”: the role JK Simmons called “ridiculously fun”
JK Simmons never expected his friendship with Sam Raimi would end up giving him the part of his career.
While it’s often the case that actors will work with the same director at multiple points in their career, friendships in the industry are few and far between. Developing a personal connection with someone who is also a co-worker, or in some cases an employer, can be a tricky subject, but there are some directors who develop a more fertile environment on their sets. This is certainly true of Raimi who began making films in his early 20s with his childhood best friend, Bruce Campbell, and would go on to develop positive collaborative relationships with many of the other actors who he worked with regularly.
For the Love of the Game is one of Raimi’s least well-remembered films, as he had to deal with a complex situation involving Kevin Costner’s ego and the MPAA, but he also had the opportunity to work with JK Simmons, then best known for his role on the HBO drama Oz, whom he cast in the role of a baseball manager.
The duo seemed to enjoy working with each other, and Raimi later cast him again to play a sheriff in his supernatural drama The Gift, which was released a year later. It was during the production that word got out that Raimi had been hired to direct Spider-Man for Sony Pictures, and that he was looking to fill out the ensemble, with Simmons recalling that he began hearing from his friends that he should seek out a role in the highly anticipated superhero film.
“I started getting calls from friends, saying, ‘Oh, you should talk to Sam’,” he said, “’You should play the bad guy. You’ve gotta play The Vulture if they have The Vulture’, because again, I’m a bald guy”.
The Vulture ended up not being the villain that Raimi chose for the first film, as he instead selected Willem Dafoe to play Norman Osborn, who becomes the Green Goblin. However, the filmmaker did have Simmons in mind for J Jonah Jameson, the editor of the Daily Bugle who hires Peter Parker, with the actor admitting that he was surprised when Raimi asked him to read for the part.
“I went in and did this really stupid audition, which I think is on the DVD, which is embarrassing, and boom!” Simmons said, “It became what it became. It was ridiculously fun, again because a significant portion of what you see on the screen, even though the script was there and was good, we just screwed around and came up with gags and ideas.”
Spider-Man fans are notoriously demanding when it comes to the accuracy of adaptations, but Simmons was universally praised for perfectly capturing the character that Stan Lee had created. Jameson ended up playing an even bigger role in the next two films, and the actor said that the office scenes he shot with Elizabeth Banks and Tobey Maguire felt like their own “comedy troupe”, of which Raimi was the leader.
Simmons had become so synonymous with the role that it was impossible for any actor to play it, so The Amazing Spider-Man films opted not to include Jameson at all, with Simmons eventually being brought back to play the character after he made a surprising cameo at the end of Spider-Man: Far From Home, starring Tom Holland.
