Timothy Simons

Jonah Ryan walks into a meeting in Veep a head taller than anyone in it, already talking, and everyone in it has already made up their mind about him. Timothy Simons's trick is that Jonah never notices. He takes the insults as weather. The character is written to be humiliated in nearly every scene, and Simons plays each humiliation as if it were the first, which is why the joke stays funny across seven seasons instead of curdling into pity.

The career before that was thin. Simons studied theatre at the University of Maine, spent several years in Chicago doing independent theatre and commercials, and moved to Los Angeles in 2008 with little film or television to his name. Then Armando Iannucci cast him in Veep (2012) as the White House liaison, built like a lamppost and addressed like one, and for seven seasons he stood beside Julia Louis-Dreyfus and absorbed whatever she threw. The film parts have stayed small: Agent Borderline in Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice (2014), Malcolm in The Interview (2014). In Nobody Wants This (2024) he is Sasha Roklov, a series regular in a romantic comedy about other people.

What works is the body and what he declines to do with it. He is very tall, and he lets directors use that, standing in doorways and looming over desks, but he never plays the height for sympathy or menace. He plays it as one more thing Jonah is oblivious to. Simons has called the character a cockroach, and that is about right: nothing keeps him down, and the survival is the joke. We laughed at Jonah for years and then caught ourselves, to our surprise, wanting him to get whatever he was after, which is a peculiar thing to feel about a man with no visible virtue. It was the eyes that did it. However hard the insult lands, nothing in them ever flinches, and after enough seasons that stubbornness starts to look like a kind of courage.

What does not work is that we have seen the shape before, and only the shape. In Nobody Wants This, Sasha is the same man at a lower volume, arrogant and slightly hapless, and Simons is funny enough with Justine Lupe to make the conversations around the central couple worth staying for. But it is a variation, not a departure. Critics who admire him say much the same: the reservation is not that he does the insufferable supporting comic badly, but that he has not yet been asked to do anything else.

The next interesting thing would be a part with no one in it to mock him. We are not sure anyone has thought to write one.