J.K. Simmons on juggling two roles in ‘Counterpart,’ debuting on CraveTV

That’s the shocking reality confronting Howard Silk (played by J.K. Simmons) in “Counterpart,” a new spy thriller premiering Sunday on CraveTV. (Photo by Own work – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0)

PASADENA, Calif. — Imagine, if you will, there were two of you. One, the ordinary, everyday you, the other a secret you’d hidden in a parallel dimension.

That’s the shocking reality confronting Howard Silk (played by J.K. Simmons) in “Counterpart,” a new spy thriller premiering Sunday on CraveTV.

Shot in Los Angeles and Berlin, the 10-episode first season originates on the U.S. premium cable network Starz. British actress Olivia Williams bolsters a strong international cast, but it’s mostly Simmons on screen in a dual performance that even he wondered might be one role too many.

Last week, Simmons joked with reporters attending the Television Critics Association press tour in Pasadena that he now considers himself, “my favourite actor to work with.” Afterwards, however, during a small, international roundtable gathering, the 63-year-old Michigan native confessed he thought twice before taking on the dual roles.

While he loved the script by creator/executive producer Justin Marks, the idea of being not just No. 1 but also No. 1A on the call sheet “was actually kind of daunting.”

“I love the writing,” he told Marks, “but my kids are in high school. I like to be able to have a job and have a life at the same time.”

But the producer told Simmons that subsequent episodes branch out, with other characters doing more of the heavy lifting.

The two Howard Silks break down this way: one is a lowly cog in a bureaucratic world deep inside a United Nations spy agency office in Berlin. His “counterpart,” part of a Cold War experiment, is a ruthless super spy assassin on the other side of a parallel dimension.

Being opposite himself onscreen required technical finesse. The idea of shooting one character’s scenes, stopping, having Simmons gain 20 kilograms and then shooting the “counterpart” was considered, but abandoned.

Simmons says he ended up “playing the scenes with another actor who would then unfortunately be erased from everything and replaced by another version of me.” It was a learning curve, he says, “as indeed life itself is.”

While fame came to him late, Simmons has been acting his entire adult life, honing his craft, as he sees it, “on a very small level on the way up. It’s not like I had a plan.”

He was studying music at university when he fell in love with being on stage at the Bigfork Summer Playhouse in Montana in 1970.

“We were working in rep and most us got to be the leading man one night and a chorus boy the next night and a character actor the next night,” he says.

After years on the stage, including Broadway, his first television job came with the bit part “patrolman in park” in the mid-’80s made-for-TV movie “Popeye Doyle” starring Ed O’Neill.

In the ’90s, Simmons started to get national attention as one of TV’s nastiest villains ever, fearsome inmate Vernon Schillinger in the HBO prison drama “Oz.”

“I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life crawling into that skin every day,” says Simmons, who switched gears and became a Comic-Con favourite as hot-headed editor J. Jonah Jameson in Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man” trilogy.

His career was further boosted through a series of roles with Montreal-born director Jason Reitman. The two have collaborated on several features, including “Thank You for Smoking,” “Juno” and “Up in the Air.” In what has been a busy past year for Simmons, he found a couple of days to make a cameo appearance in Reitman’s upcoming Hugh Jackman feature, “The Front Runner.”

“I always have a great time working with him,” says Simmons of Reitman.

The biggest boost, of course, came after winning an Academy Award for playing a savagely intense conductor in the 2015 drama “Whiplash.” Since then, Simmons can pick and choose his scripts, or take a summer off as he did last year, touring Europe with his wife and two children. Then there’s his favourite kind of casting: fishing, which he occasionally does in Canada.

“I look back 10, 20, 40 years ago when I was trying to get a line on a soap opera, anything,” he says.” It’s surreal to be in the position I’m in now.”