I want to be like Bradley Cooper when I grow up.
— J. K. Simmons
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 read 'Whiplash,' and I wanted to do it.
I don't respond to authority figures who abuse their authority.
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.
My aunt was so attuned to commercials that she could always identify the voiceover actor.
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.
You can't play a guy who's just a snake, because what do you draw on?
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.
Good material is good material.
In lean times, you get plenty of sleep, and you're not flying around everywhere.
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'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.
There's another film - a little Greek movie - that hopefully is going to get some distribution here in the U.S., called 'Worlds Apart,' where I also play a 60-year-old guy who looks a lot like J.K. Simmons, who has a romantic relationship with an appropriate woman.
Generally, if I read something that I think is really good and that I feel a connection with and is right for me, I see and hear who the guy is, as manifested by me.
I actually was a musician in college, a composer and singer, and really intended to be the second coming of Leonard Bernstein when I got out.
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.
Maybe when my kids are grown up, I can go back to Broadway. It would be great someday, I suppose.
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 would like to thank the 49 actors who appear on screen in 'Whiplash' for realizing Damien Chazelle's vision so beautifully.
Teaching is in my blood.
I like to stay home. I don't want to be away shooting in Europe for six or eight months at a stretch.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's nice to be number one on the call sheet.
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.
I don't think I've ever watched a movie to prepare for a role.
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.
My overall quest is always to do something that's somehow different from whatever it is that I just got done doing. If that can include occasionally playing an older guy who has a romantic side and a romantic relationship, than that's a real treat.
We all want to not repeat ourselves constantly, and explore the limits of our capabilities.
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.
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.
I've always believed, maybe naively, that 'The play's the thing.'
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 do respond well to a director, a teacher - someone who doesn't accept mediocrity.
Education is very important to me.
It's OK to turn down stuff that isn't really interesting and spend the summer with my family.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
With these big superhero movies, everybody is so tight-lipped about everything, there's a certain amount of just going on faith.
I completely agree with feeling the need for or the benefits of being pushed and of being directed on a project and collaborating.
The retired L.A.P.D. motor cops who work set security now, all wear the same uniform, they're great guys with great stories, and they're great at their job, providing security on sets.
I've been so blessed to have the opportunities that I've had.
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.
