Despite holding a professional degree in music, JJ Simmons learnt jazz to perfect his role in the Oscar-nominated Whiplash. He talks about his struggling days and making offbeat choices
You play a music teacher in Whiplash and you also studied music. Did you ever come across anyone like your character Terrence FletcherIJ
No. I certainly knew some guys who studied under some really brilliantly musicians who were perfectionists but nobody who was as borderline psychopathic and abusive as Fletcher.
Are you a perfectionist like Fletcher in real lifeIJ
Not really. In my work I try to get things right, to do it well. If there are specific skills involved — like in this case conducting or playing the piano or in my forthcoming film where I play a character of German origin — I’m very meticulous about learning accents and dialects and things which the character might demand. That’s probably the closest I come to being a perfectionist.
When did you switch from music to actingIJ
That was a sort of gradual transition. I was studying music in college. I was singing and doing operas and Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. Then I was offered a job as the music director of the Bigfork Summer Playhouse in Bigfork, Montana.
I got up there and also ended up playing the lead in one of the four musicals that summer. I played the lead in Brigadoon. I worked with a few really good directors up there, during that summer and over the next few years. During that time they began to teach me how to be an actor and respect for the craft — how to take what I was feeling inside and translate it into a character.
When did you realise that you wanted to pursue acting full timeIJ
Not for a long time. When I graduated from college I moved to Seattle and still didn’t know if I wanted to be a composer, conductor, singer or an actor. I just got day jobs and auditioned and took what came. The theater doors were the ones opening the most. I got to work with some really good actors and directors in Seattle doing plays, musicals on Shakespeare and learning through it.
Then I moved to New York and did regional theater and I finally got a big Broadway show. That felt like, “I’ve made it. I’m on Broadway, in a new production directed by Jerry Zaks. It’s going to be a hit and run forever.” For theater, that’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Then, a few years later, Oz (1997) came along and that was like another, “I’m actually on HBO.” A couple years after that I was doing Spider-Man (2002) movies. There have been a lot steps along the way that felt like major accomplishments-or half-accomplishment and half stroke of luck.
Does Whiplash feel like another stepIJ
Yes. So much of my career as a screen actor has been in smaller and supporting roles and this is certainly a supporting role as well but people refer to this as a two-hander even though there are wonderful characters in it. It’s a very meaningful part that’s a bigger part of the script than a lot of my characters tend to be. In that way it’s sort of another level of accomplishment.
Director Damien Chazelle was unaware of your musical background when he cast you as Fletcher...
We had lunch in lA and it was one of those meetings where I felt like trying and pitching myself for the part and he was trying to pitch the part to me because Jason Reitman (who directed me in Juno) had suggested me for the role.
The first thing he said was, “I don’t want you to get nervous or feel overwhelmed by the musical aspect. We’ll find a conductor who will be a technical advisor and teach you how to do all this stuff.” And I I said, “I’ve got a degree in music — not jazz — I was never a jazz conductor but I led pit bands and was a classical conductor, composer and singer. So I am one lucky step ahead on that. And it was the same with Miles (Teller), too. He had been playing drums since he was 15 years old.
Whiplash was shot in an unbelievably short space of time…
19 days! And you know, I had it easy, I only worked 15 or 16 of those days. It’s Miles’s movie, he was there all day every day. The crew had banked a lot of overtime during the first week, by wrapping in 12 hours, so for that first week we were thinking, “Oh, this is a piece of cake!” But then that last week, we were working like 17 to 18 hours a day and as Miles said, “It’s a lot easier to just be exhausted than to pretend to be exhausted on-screen.”