Jimmi Simpson is the intense, slightly off-centre man at the edge of other people's stories, and he has been doing it well in comedy and science fiction for more than twenty years. Somebody should give him the middle.
Fi1m perspective
In Dark Matter (2024) Joel Edgerton spends nine episodes being glum in two directions at once, and the one person on screen who seems to be enjoying himself is Jimmi Simpson. His Ryan Holder is the friend whose career went where Jason's did not, and Simpson plays him loose and likeable, the one person who does not seem to be carrying the plot on his shoulders. The series is grey and careful and it needed him. It also, as we said at the time, used him less than it should, which is roughly the story of his career.
He has been the intense, off-centre man at the side of other people's stories since his debut in Loser (2000), which came after a theatre degree at Bloomsburg and four seasons at Williamstown. The first part anyone remembers is Liam McPoyle, the recurring comic grotesque he began playing on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia in 2005. In between came Mike Mageau in David Fincher's Zodiac (2007), a small part in which he showed the wounded intensity that became his stock in trade, and Gavin Orsay in House of Cards from 2013.
The turn came in 2016, when Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy cast him as William in Westworld, a part that ran across several seasons and made him a dramatic actor in the eyes of people who had only known the McPoyle laugh. Black Mirror's "USS Callister" (2017), with Simpson as Walton, followed, and then Pachinko and Dark Matter, and by now he is a fixture of speculative television. Whenever a series needs a man who might be the joke or might be the threat, and would rather not say which yet, the call goes to him.
That is the strength and the limit. Simpson told Vanity Fair in 2019 that "a lot of the characters I play are [there] to spike the punch of the story", which is an honest description and a slightly sad one. He is good at spiking. We have rarely seen him asked to be the punch. Nobody has much bad to say about him; the nearest thing to a criticism is that he keeps getting the same eccentric supporting part in the same genre, and he has said himself that this comes down to what he is offered rather than what he can do.
In Dark Matter we found ourselves looking for him in scenes he was not in, because the series was so evenly lit and so evenly acted that his was the only face with any weather on it, and we were faintly annoyed at a show that had this on hand and kept cutting back to the box. Somebody should build a series around him rather than beside him. Until they do, he is the reason to keep watching things that are otherwise not quite worth it.
Biography
Jimmi Simpson, also credited as James Raymond Simpson, is an American actor. He was born on 21 November 1975 in Hackettstown, New Jersey. After graduating from Bloomsburg University with a Bachelor of Arts in theatre, he performed for four seasons at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts.
Simpson made his feature film debut in Loser (2000). His subsequent film credits include Zodiac (2007), Date Night (2010), Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012), White House Down (2013) and Unhinged (2020). On television he has appeared in House of Cards (2013), It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Psych, Westworld (2016) and Black Mirror.
He played Tom Andrews in the series Pachinko (2022). Simpson has also worked in theatre, receiving a Theatre World Award for his performance in the 2007 Broadway production of The Farnsworth Invention.
