‘I’ve literally never had a goal besides if I don’t enjoy this craft, I’m not gonna do it anymore,’ Simpson tells PEOPLE
Credit: Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty
NEED TO KNOW
- Jimmi Simpson is embracing a slower pace at 50, focusing on personal self-care and meaningful projects
- Simpson tells PEOPLE that after his milestone birthday, he realized he doesn’t need “to constantly be working”
- With recent roles on Dark Matter season 2, The Walking Dead: Dead City, and an upcoming horror movie, Slay, the actor is still keeping busy — but on his own terms.
Jimmi Simpson is marking his next chapter with a new outlook on life.
After nearly three decades of building an eclectic career that has taken him from horror and sci-fi to comedy and a political thriller, the Dark Matter star, 50, is taking a bit of a step back.
“I’m giving myself permission to slow the hustle down,” Simpson tells PEOPLE. “There’s less of a desire to prove yourself. And there’s more of an anxiety, a desire to be your authentic self, which doesn’t require anyone’s thumbs up.”
Since breaking out in 2000’s Loser, Simpson has amassed more than 80 film and television credits over the past 26 years. Along the way, he has played a hacker on Netflix’s House of Cards, a cynical billionaire on Westworld and an unhinged, unibrowed menace on FX’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
Credit: John P. Johnson/HBO
Now, rather than going from one project to the next, Simpson’s more interested in making the time he has count.
“It wasn’t until turning this age that I was like, ‘Oh, right. What do I wanna do?’” Simpson says of the shift that came into focus after celebrating his milestone birthday last November. “You don’t need to constantly be working. You can just relax and enjoy this existence while you still have it.”
These days, Simpson’s more selective about which roles he takes on, diving only into ones that challenge him. It seems the stranger, the better.
“I only do projects that I love. If I read a project and I know I can do it, I know I’ve done it before, at this point, it’s less interesting to me,” the Black Mirror actor says. “If I read a project and think, ‘Oh, s—, [I’m] not sure what I would do here,’ that’s probably the job I’m going to take.”
Recently, those roles have included a turn as a former cop-turned-zombie-loving bar owner, Dillard, in AMC’s The Walking Dead: Dead City. The TWD spinoff also reunited him with Jeffrey Dean Morgan, 60, more than two decades after guest-starring together on a season 2 episode of Lifetime’s cop series The Division, which Simpson described as “a wild homecoming” for the pair.
Credit: Robert Clark/AMC
“We found each other on set that first day and just dropped into this instant camaraderie and friendship,” Simpson says, adding, “It was a reunion that we didn’t know we needed.”
“Our friendship was so fast and firm and deeply loving,” he continues. “You get a couple of dudes who fall for each other as friends the way we did, and that really informed the scene work. We miss each other when we’re not together now.”
Simpson also reprise his fan-favorite character Liam McPoyle on season 18 of It’s Always Sunny, which premiered Aug. 17 on Hulu and FX.
Credit: Patrick McElhenney/FX
“They brought me, Nate Mooney and Guillermo Del Toro back for that,” he says of reprising their roles as the chaotic McPoyle family, teasing, “That’s a pretty funny episode.”
If that isn’t enough, Simpson is also back for the long-awaited second season of Apple TV’s sci-fi thriller Dark Matter alongside Joel Edgerton, 52, Alice Braga, 43, and Jennifer Connelly, 55, on Aug. 28. Based on Blake Crouch’s best-seller, the series explores a person’s alternate lives if they had made different choices.
Credit: Apple TV
When asked what his life would have been like had he not become an actor, the Hackettstown, New Jersey, native is quick to respond.
“I would’ve been an English teacher. That was what I went to school to be,” says Simpson, who minored in business at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania—“just in case” he needed a job.
A self-described “voracious reader” of sci-fi who consumed Twilight Zone marathons growing up, it’s easy to understand some of Simpson’s acting choices when you know his inspirations include Stephen King, Herman Melville, Victor Hugo, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury.
“I would consume every Asimov or Bradbury,” he says of the I, Robot and Fahrenheit 451 authors, respectively. “I was obsessed with every Stephen King book … He showed me what storytelling was.”
He fell into acting after comedian Lewis Black and his agent saw him perform stand-up at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts. After Black introduced them, she signed Simpson, and he began auditioning in both New York and Hollywood.
“I thought movie stars were Tom Cruise. I thought all of them were super cool, super handsome, and I’m very much an everyman. I’m comfortable with that,” says Simpson, seemingly unaware of his own stardom (he’s been compared to Christian Slater).
“Each job I’ve gotten then and now, I’m stunned,” Simpson says, adding that he has always had very little expectation when it came to landing parts, something that may have factored into how he was able to build such an eclectic career. “A lot of actors who start with an idea of, ‘I need that spotlight, I need this validation,’ there is something they’re searching for …. I’ve literally never had a goal besides if I don’t enjoy this craft, I’m not going to do it anymore.”
Credit: Corey Nickols/Getty
Of whether there was ever a role that got away, Simpson couldn’t name one.
“There have been parts that I thought would be cool to play, I’m sure, but nothing has held a space of, ‘Oh, that was mine, and they got it,’” he says.
And while he plans to offset work with “a lot of personal self-care,” there’s still plenty that Simpson wants to explore creatively.
“I’ll keep working. I love that,” he says, noting an upcoming film he’s “excited” about.
“I wrote and produced a movie called Slay that’s going to London’s Frightfest at the end of this month,” he says of the upcoming horror movie starring Zoey Luna and Aya Cash that he wrote in two months. “And I’ve written a few scripts. I’ve sold two, but this is the first thing that’s come all the way through.”
Credit: Courtesy of Jimmi Simpson
He’ll also appear in an episode of The Simpsons “next season” and the second season of Netflix’s animated series Haunted Hotel, in which he voices an immortal demon, which is set to return in October.
And then there are bucket list items.
The King fanatic would love seeing his 1990 novella The Langoliers, about airline passengers who travel through a tear in the fabric of time, adapted again. He would also jump at the chance to star in a production of one of his favorite King novels, 1984’s The Eyes of the Dragon, which follows a prince being framed for his father’s murder.
Either would bring Simpson full circle with the author who helped inspire him after appearing in a 2002 miniseries adaptation of King’s Rose Red.
But for now, Simpson is less concerned with chasing the next big thing than he is with appreciating what he’s already built.
“The older you get, the more finite you appear,” he says. “With that comes this wisdom to just be. That’s one of the beautiful things about turning this age …. I’m really just grateful for all of it.”
New episodes of The Walking Dead: Dead City air Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on AMC. Dark Matter season 2 drops new episodes Fridays on Apple TV.
Read the full article here
