{"id":147508,"date":"2018-01-19T02:33:00","date_gmt":"2018-01-19T07:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=147508"},"modified":"2018-01-19T02:33:00","modified_gmt":"2018-01-19T07:33:00","slug":"j-k-simmons-on-juggling-two-roles-in-counterpart-debuting-on-cravetv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2018\/01\/19\/j-k-simmons-on-juggling-two-roles-in-counterpart-debuting-on-cravetv\/","title":{"rendered":"J.K. Simmons on juggling two roles in ‘Counterpart,’ debuting on CraveTV"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"That's<\/a>
That’s the shocking reality confronting Howard Silk (played by J.K. Simmons) in \u201cCounterpart,\u201d a new spy thriller premiering Sunday on CraveTV. (Photo by Own work – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

PASADENA, Calif. \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

That’s the shocking reality confronting Howard Silk (played by J.K. Simmons) in \u201cCounterpart,\u201d a new spy thriller premiering Sunday on CraveTV.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Last week, Simmons joked with reporters attending the Television Critics Association press tour in Pasadena that he now considers himself, \u201cmy favourite actor to work with.\u201d Afterwards, however, during a small, international roundtable gathering, the 63-year-old Michigan native confessed he thought twice before taking on the dual roles.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cwas actually kind of daunting.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI love the writing,\u201d he told Marks, \u201cbut my kids are in high school. I like to be able to have a job and have a life at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the producer told Simmons that subsequent episodes branch out, with other characters doing more of the heavy lifting.<\/p>\n

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 \u201ccounterpart,\u201d part of a Cold War experiment, is a ruthless super spy assassin on the other side of a parallel dimension.<\/p>\n

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 \u201ccounterpart\u201d was considered, but abandoned.<\/p>\n

Simmons says he ended up \u201cplaying the scenes with another actor who would then unfortunately be erased from everything and replaced by another version of me.\u201d It was a learning curve, he says, \u201cas indeed life itself is.\u201d<\/p>\n

While fame came to him late, Simmons has been acting his entire adult life, honing his craft, as he sees it, \u201con a very small level on the way up. It’s not like I had a plan.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was studying music at university when he fell in love with being on stage at the Bigfork Summer Playhouse in Montana in 1970.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe 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,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

After years on the stage, including Broadway, his first television job came with the bit part \u201cpatrolman in park\u201d in the mid-’80s made-for-TV movie \u201cPopeye Doyle\u201d starring Ed O’Neill.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cOz.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn’t want to spend the rest of my life crawling into that skin every day,\u201d says Simmons, who switched gears and became a Comic-Con favourite as hot-headed editor J. Jonah Jameson in Sam Raimi’s \u201cSpider-Man\u201d trilogy.<\/p>\n

His career was further boosted through a series of roles with Montreal-born director Jason Reitman. The two have collaborated on several features, including \u201cThank You for Smoking,\u201d \u201cJuno\u201d and \u201cUp in the Air.\u201d 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, \u201cThe Front Runner.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI always have a great time working with him,\u201d says Simmons of Reitman.<\/p>\n

The biggest boost, of course, came after winning an Academy Award for playing a savagely intense conductor in the 2015 drama \u201cWhiplash.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI look back 10, 20, 40 years ago when I was trying to get a line on a soap opera, anything,\u201d he says.\u201d It’s surreal to be in the position I’m in now.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PASADENA, Calif. \u2014 Imagine, if you will, there were two of you. One, the ordinary, everyday you, the other a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":147522,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,106],"tags":[43996,43997,43995],"class_list":["post-147508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","category-hollywood","tag-counterpart","tag-cravetv","tag-j-k-simmons","mauthors-bill-brioux","mauthors-the-canadian-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147508\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/147522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}