You play a music teacher in Whiplash and you studied music back in University. Did you ever come across anyone like your own character from the movie?
I can’t say like Fletcher, no. I certainly knew some guys who studied under some really brilliant musicians who were perfectionists… but nobody who was as borderline psychopathic and abusive as Fletcher.
Are you a perfectionist?
No, not really. In my work I try to get things right, to do it well, and if in this case conducting or playing the piano, or in this film I have coming up where I play a character who is German, I’m very meticulous about learning accents and dialects and those kinds of things. That’s probably the closest I come to being a perfectionist.
When did you switch from music to acting?
That was a sort of gradual transition. I was studying music in college. I was singing, I was doing operas and Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, and 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, because I was sort of the best singer for the part. I worked with a few really, really good directors up there, during that summer and over the next few years, and they began to teach me how to be an actor and respect the craft — how to take what I was feeling inside and translate it into a character.
When did you feel like, ‘Okay, this is going to be my full-time job?’
Not for a long time. When I got out of college, I moved to Seattle because it was the nearest big city and still didn’t know if I wanted to be a composer, conductor, singer, actor....
I just got day jobs and auditioned and took what came and the theatre doors were the ones opening the most. I got to work with some really good actors and directors in Seattle, doing plays, musicals and Shakespeare. I think, in a way, when I got my Equity Card (proof of membership in the Actors’ Equity Association in the US) I sort of felt like, ‘Wow, I’m going to be able to pay my rent by acting’. Only for six weeks until the play closes, but I really felt like that made a dent. Obviously there were other steps, other rungs on the ladder since then. Fortunately, for the first 20 years in my career, I didn’t have any other responsibilities outside of myself. I didn’t have a wife and kids, so I could afford to sort of barely scrape by, to do theatre. I moved to New York and did regional theatre and I finally got a big hit Broadway show. That definitely felt like, ‘Wow, now I’ve really made it. I’m on Broadway. I’m in a new production directed by Jerry Zaks. It’s going to be a hit and run forever’. Then, a few years later, Oz (1997) comes along and that was like another, ‘Wow, I’m actually on HBO’. A couple of years after that I was doing Spider-Man movies. There have been a lot of steps along the way that felt like major accomplishments — or half accomplishment and half stroke of luck.
Does Whiplash feel like another step?
Yeah. 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. I still go in and read for directors and meet directors, but it’s nice to have somebody just offer me a part like this out of the blue. In that way it’s sort of another level of accomplishment.
Damien Chazelle (director) has said he was unaware of your musical background when he cast you as Fletcher...
Yeah. We had lunch in LA and it was one of those meetings where I felt I was going to try and pitch myself for the part, and he was going to try to pitch the part to me because Jason Reitman (filmmaker) had suggested me for the part. He said, ‘I don’t want you to get nervous or feel overwhelmed by the musical aspect and conducting. We’ll find a conductor who will be a technical adviser and teach you how to do all this stuff’. And I said, ‘Let me stop you right there. 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 and composer and singer so I am one lucky step ahead on that’.
Whiplash was shot in an unbelievably short space of time…
Nineteen days! And you know, I had it easy, I only worked 15 or 16 of those days. It’s Miles’s (Teller, who plays Fletcher’s student Andrew Neiman) movie, he was there all day every day. And the crew, god bless them. They 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 17-18 hours a day, and as Miles says, it’s a lot easier to just be exhausted than to pretend to be exhausted on screen.
Fletcher is a fairly mysterious figure. Did you have a backstory in mind for your own reference?
Yeah, I had some, and we actually spent the better part of a day shooting scenes of Fletcher in his apartment by himself. It was really the only time the film ever went away from Miles’s point of view, which is why it ultimately was excised from the film. There were some little hints there about a backstory for Fletcher and why he was the way he was, seeing a different side of him and also seeing possibilities of why he was such a miserable, unhappy guy.
But I love that in the final cut, none of that exists, and none of it is necessary. We don’t need to know more about this guy because the film is Andrew’s story, and how he perceives Fletcher is how Fletcher exists in the film.
Awards Simmons has already bagged for Whiplash
- Golden Globe Bafta
- Screen Actors Guild Awards
- African-American Film Critics Association
- Alliance of Women Film Journalists
- Austin Film Critics Association
- Boston Society of Film Critics Awards
- Broadcast Film Critics Association
- Central Ohio Film Critics Association
- Chicago Film Critics Association Awards
- Dallas-Fort Worth Film CriticsAssociation Awards
- Denver Film Critics Society
- Detroit Film Critic Society
- Florida Film Critics Circle Awards
- Georgia Film Critics Association
- Houston Film Critics Society Awards
- London Critics Circle Film Awards
- Palm Springs International Film Festival
- Toronto Film Critics Association