“I’ve always had a love for theater,” says Henry Simmons. “Out here in
Los Angeles, it’s more geared towards movies and television.”
With a career that is just over a decade old, Simmons has made
significant inroads on both TV and the movies. The strikingly handsome
actor turned heads for five seasons on NYPD Blue and two more on
the recently cancelled series Shark, as well as appearing in
several movies. However, growing up in the New York area, Simmons had
missed the immediacy of the stage – both as a spectator and as an
actor.
Many people feel such a sense of loss when their lives move on,
but
surprisingly few are willing to put their time and money to rectifying
the condition. Recently after returning home for Christmas and
catching up on some plays, Simmons returned to work on his then-current
series Shark with James Woods. He started discussing his trip
with his co-star Sophina Brown and was surprised to find she was a
Broadway baby, too.
“She was like, ‘Oh, you go to see theater?’” Simmons recalls. “It
turned out that she loves theater as well… During the process of work
on Shark, she’s become one of my best friends. She’s absolutely
wonderful. Smart actress. Smart woman. When we found out the show
wasn’t coming back, we both had this hunger to do theater and said, ‘You
know what? Let’s produce something of our own.’ We started to tackle
projects and plays that we normally wouldn’t have a chance for. We were
going to get the most growth and the most challenges at that.”
Brown introduced Simmons to a small theater company that she was
involved in. It is called The Playground.
The Playground quickly became a passion for both
actors. The first fruit of this passion is about to reach the stage,
with Simmons, Brown and Rick Wasserman (of the TV series Swingtown)
starring in and producing a run of Harold Pinter’s notoriously difficult
play Betrayal – which tells of a love triangle destroying three
people’s relationships. What makes Betrayal different is the
time structure, the play starts at the end and works backwards to the
beginning.
Betrayal
is playing at the Matrix Theater in Los Angeles from July 10 to July 27,
2008.
It is interesting that Simmons has found this passion, because growing
up he had no clue that he would ever try acting. The son of an IRS
agent and a school teacher who grew up in suburban Stamford,
Connecticut, he was a business major in college as well as a basketball
star.
It was his coach who first opened Simmons’ eyes to the idea of acting.
“He knew I had a love for classic movies,” Simmons recalls. “I don’t
know how he found out, but he knew it. Just out of the blue one day –
and I think it was really an act of God – he said, ‘You should take an
acting class.’ I looked at him like he had three heads. I mean, it
just came out of the blue. I thought about it and I thought about it
and I said, yeah…. He kept saying, ‘Hey did you enroll in that class
yet?’ and I’d say no. Finally I did and I loved it.”
Still,
after graduation, Simmons took the sensible road and joined a
Fortune 500 company in a ground-floor position – and he hated it.
Simmons quickly realized he wasn’t built to be an exec. Soon he was
going on auditions for acting roles during his lunch hour. Eventually
he was ready to take the leap. He quit his job and decided to give
everything to acting. It wasn’t easy – during the first year Simmons
was nearly destitute.
“I’ll
tell you; really that was one of the most difficult periods of my life,”
Simmons recalls. “Here you are. You go all your life and you train.
You go to school saying; okay what I’m going to do is I’m going to get a
career where I can be comfortable. Especially in New England, [which
is] pretty conservative…. When I do this job, I realize comfort does
not translate into happiness.”
That was not the only thing which did not translate into happiness for
Simmons. He spurned offers to become a model, saying he was
uncomfortable with just posing in front of a camera with nothing else to
do. In fact, Simmons is refreshingly down-to-earth about his chiseled
looks, humbly saying “thank you for that” when I referred to him as a
handsome man – almost as if the idea had never been brought up before.
Eventually things started to go Simmons’ way, and ironically it was
basketball that gave Simmons his first two big breaks. He got a role in
the Tupac Shakur movie Above the Rim. Soon afterwards, he got
the opportunity to appear in a bit on the long-lived series Saturday
Night Live.
“That came about because [of] friends of mine from a movie,” Simmons
says. “It was a basketball movie and they were supposed to play
basketball in this particular skit. They asked me to come along. I
said, yeah, I don’t want to do any extra work. But I needed the money,
so I sat in. A basketball player at the time, named Derrick Coleman,
broke his ankle the night before. So the day of, [the producers] said,
‘Would you mind filling in for him?’ Saying his lines and everything.
Yeah, sure! That was my first stint on television.”
Soon afterwards, Simmons was hired to be on the daytime drama Another
World. He ended up on the show for two years – playing Tyrone
Montgomery. He was thankful for the experience, but also thankful to
move on.
“I think it’s a twofold thing,” Simmons says. “It can be helpful
[for an actor], but
it also can be hurtful. I went in there with a conscious decision to
really take the work seriously and try to break down each script and try
to work at it from that point of view. Also, it helped me in terms of
learning how to work with learning how to work with cameras and things
like that. And different directors.”
It also gave Simmons the courage to make a huge step. He moved to Los
Angeles, deciding that was where he had to be if he really wanted to
make it. The risk paid off handsomely. Soon Simmons was brought
onboard one of the most acclaimed dramas of the last decade – ironically
one named after the place Simmons had just left. Simmons was the latest
detective on the classic police series NYPD Blue.
“I tell you, every time I talk about that show, I smile,” Simmons says.
“I’m so proud of it. I lived in New York for so many years and I came
out here with nothing. I was blessed. Within the first four months I
got that audition for NYPD Blue. Everything happened from
there.”
Of course, NYPD Blue had been filming for several years before
Simmons joined the precinct. This put Simmons in the interesting
situation where he was a newer character having to fit in on an
established show. However, Simmons never really felt the learning curve
or the need to fit in.
“I’ll tell you why,” Simmons recalls. “It didn’t because of the caliber
of actors, directors, writers, producers…. To this point, to this day
of all the things I’ve done NYPD Blue is where… and no slight to
anything else… it’s just where across the board from the top of the
ladder to the end of the ladder, where everything was top caliber.
Everyone was so passionate.”
It also gave Simmons the opportunity to work with one of the great
actors on television, Dennis Franz, who played Det. Andy Sipowicz
through the run of the series. Later, after Blue ended, Simmons
had the opportunity to work with yet another great actor, spending two
years with James Woods in the series Shark. Simmons appreciated
the opportunity to work with these talented men, and the chance to learn
from them.
“From Dennis Franz, I’ve learned preparation and being in the moment,”
Simmons says. “I’ve learned a lot by seeing him work. He’s very much
in the moment and very much about the character. With James Woods I’ve
learned many things – not just from an actor’s perspective, because the
thing about James is he doesn’t look at things just from an actor’s
perspective. He looks at things from a director’s perspective. It’s
much more effective as an actor when you can look at things from
different perspectives. When you approach a scene… not in the work that
you do at home, but I’m talking when you’re actually on set… you [can]
approach things from even the audience’s perspective. He’s very attuned
that way.”
Simmons was also grateful for the two years spent on Shark, which
was a huge hit in its first season but then surprisingly was cancelled
after the second – despite respectable ratings. Still, he wouldn’t
trade the experience.
“Shark was wonderful,” Simmons says, enthusiastically. “It was
absolutely wonderful. It was nice stepping into a show that was
actually growing and wasn’t already established. It was nice to be
involved with something where there was an energy. Where people were
hungry to find their way. It was very rewarding. Particularly with the
caliber of actors I worked with there and the relationships I’ve gained
with those people.”
One
of those relationships led to the Playground. Just because Shark
was off the air, Simmons and Sophina Brown were not ready to stop
working together.
“Sophina was already involved with it and I now am involved with it,”
Simmons says. “It’s growing. It’s been a while, but it’s now growing.
We don’t have a tremendous amount of actors, so we had to get a play
that was low in cost and didn’t have a lot of players in it.”
The script they settled on was Harold Pinter’s Betrayal – a play
which Simmons acknowledges he was not all that familiar with when they
chose it.
“Honestly, that’s one of the reasons why we chose it,” Simmons says. “I
didn’t want to do something where I was comfortable with, that I had
already done or even experienced in some way. I wanted to do something
that was completely foreign to me. All of us did.
“We came across this play. I was like: oh, yeah, this is great, this is
great.” He laughs. “It wasn’t until we start with the rehearsal
process that the director and the actors – all of us – we realized wow,
this is much more difficult than it appears on paper.”
Simmons plays Robert, a married man whose wife Emma (played by Brown)
has an affair with his best friend (Wasserman). It is a complex study
of human emotions; none of the characters react as you would assume they
would. Some of the great actors of our time have played the role. Ben
Kingsley did the role in the movie, following up his Oscar for
Gandhi. Other actors who have played the role over the years have
included Roy Scheider, Daniel Massey, John Slattery, Hayden Adams and
even the playwright Pinter, himself.
However, Simmons is not concerned about comparing with previous
performances. In fact, he says, the Playground’s version of Betrayal
is unique on a very simple level.
“I think our play is significantly different from anything that’s ever
been done simply by the dynamics,” Simmons says. “You know, two people
of color and someone not. That dynamic alone, I think, sets us apart
from everyone else. Personally, me being an African American, I
certainly don’t act as an African American. There are things
that I bring to the role from my own experiences… or I should say, not
my experiences, but my own perception that makes mine different than
anyone else’s.”
Betrayal
is a pretty dark play. Simmons has also tended to take very dramatic
roles on television. Yet, surprisingly, most of Simmons’ work in films
has been in comedies – including Are We There Yet?, Madea’s Family
Reunion, Something New and Taxi.
In fact, that distinction is such a surprise that it even surprised
Simmons.
“Hey, that is interesting,” he says, surprised. “I never even
realized. I didn’t realize that. That’s pretty good. You know, I
think my heart goes towards drama, but I love comedy as well. I really
love comedy because it’s a different color. As an actor, whatever
picture I want to paint for me – on my canvas of work – I want many
different colors.”
It’s no real surprise to those who know him, though.
“Among people that are really close to me, I’m very silly,” Simmons
says. “These characters I play are very serious and they’re tough guys
at times, but I’m silly. I’m a silly guy. I’m just loose and laid
back.”
One dramatic film that Simmons has done was the indie South of Pico,
for which he recently won Best Actor from the American Black Film
Festival. Right now, the film’s release is up in the air, but
Simmons hopes it sees the light of day.
“I don’t know about its release,” Simmons admits. “I’m not sure yet. I
think it’s very tough with independent films. This one is a straight
drama. It’s very dramatic. It’s about four people from different walks
of life. Their lives come together and are intertwined based on one
tragic event that takes place. These people are pretty much in a crisis
of their lives and this one event that takes place brings them all
together in some way.”
Simmons realizes that he has been lucky to do what he loves as a career
and he does not take that for granted. He tries his best to help causes
that touch him – either through money or spreading the word. Lately he
has been active in helping the Santa Monica Rape Treatment Center.
“I think if somebody knows my name or recognizes me, I think it helps if
I can speak about certain things that I’m passionate about. Because,
like the Rape Treatment Center – I really didn’t know anything about it
until other celebrities talked about it.”
Another thing Simmons is passionate about is the condition of the United
States. While he does not consider himself to be an overly political
man, he has done his part to help in the 2008 Presidential elections.
“From the very beginning I’ve supported Obama and I’ve been to a lot of
fundraisers,” Simmons says. “I’m on their website. I mean I wouldn’t
say that is a cause, but the direction of this country is something I’m
passionate about. I’m not Alec Baldwin in any way. I’m not. Alec
Baldwin is very knowledgeable and I really admire him, in terms of his
stance. I’d like to stay in the background and try to promote things
that way.”
For now, though, the main thing he wants to promote is The Playground.
Theatre is not just a passion for Simmons, with a possible looming
actor’s strike; it is a good alternative to stay busy during any down
time.
“Well, that’s the goal,” Simmons says. “Honestly, the goal for the
Playground is to do one or two plays a year. This is our inaugural play
that we are producing and putting up, but that’s the goal, to do one or
two plays a year. In terms of the strike, we’ll just have to see. But
we’re also looking at something later on this year.”
In the meantime, Simmons enjoys playing a wide variety of roles. For a
man who people just naturally notice, though, Simmons likes the idea of
blending in. Not that he is against the idea of taking leading roles.
However, that is part of his master plan.
“I think at some point… yes, I would like to do leading man work. Yes.
For this reason – because I think in doing leading work it offers more
opportunities to do character work. That’s ultimately what I love most,
the character work.”
Perhaps that is the best way to describe Henry Simmons. He is a character actor in a leading man’s body.
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