Oscar-Winner J.K. Simmons Talks MGM+’s ‘The Westies,’ OSU & More with Rich

Before J.K. Simmons was an Academy Award winner, he was a doorman looking over his shoulder at 1 a.m. with a pocket full of tips. That is the world he returns to in The Westies, the new MGM+ series premiering July 12th, set inside the Hell's Kitchen gang that Simmons knew from his years waiting tables in New York.

"Making ends meet, seeing if they had an opening at Joe Allen again," Simmons told Rich, recalling the stretch from 1982 to 2003 when he lived in the city, doing regional theater in Buffalo, Boston and Minneapolis before circling back to New York. The Westies shot in Toronto, not New York, and Simmons did not sugarcoat why. "There's people aren't making a lot of stuff in New York and L.A. these days."

He raved about the cast, a genuinely international group playing blue-collar New York tough guys. "The variety of dialects that were flying around that room," Simmons said, noting that Tom Brittney and others are proper Englishmen, while several of the Irish castmates are, as he put it, fresh off the boat. It is the same instinct for ensemble he traced back to Oz, the show that started in a Chelsea flower warehouse before losing its lease and relocating to Bayonne. A typical New York story, he said, the landlord tripling the rent once the show became a hit.

The conversation turned, as it always does with Simmons, to his sports allegiances. He is a diehard Detroit Tigers and Ohio State fan, a loyalty rooted in family history. His father taught junior high music in Detroit when Simmons was born, then took a job at Ohio State when Simmons was 10. He remembers watching games from the nosebleeds at old Tiger Stadium, 440 feet to dead center with the flagpole in play, and cheering during the last two lines of the national anthem the way New Yorkers do, to the bafflement of Midwesterners around him.

Simmons hosted this year's NFL Draft, which he called a test of his professionalism given how many Buckeyes came off the board. He praised Carnell Tate as the real deal and told the story of Sonny Styles at the Combine, where after dominating his workout, Styles asked an NFL Network producer, "Was that any good? Did I do okay?" Humility, Simmons marveled, on top of being an absolute beast.

He is also, at the moment, obsessed with Curt Cignetti and what Indiana is building. "From like game five I was like, Indiana is for real, and they were like, it's Indiana, and I was like, not anymore." Simmons sees old-school Big Ten football in Cignetti, the kind that tells a turnover-prone quarterback he is meeting his two new best friends, a run game and a defense.

The Whiplash talk was a treat. Simmons confirmed the infamous chair throw was one hundred percent scripted and, in his words, mildly concerning. "Chairs are heavy and I threw it at Miles Teller right over his head." Two takes, on a tight budget, no stunt double. And he insisted his younger self could not have handled it. "Early on in my career, I was a terrible actor," he said, crediting years of theater in Montana and Seattle for molding him.

The Westies premieres July 12th on MGM+.