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J.K. Simmons: A real character

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Like so many New Yorkers, Jonathan Kimble Simmons was born elsewhere, but this is home. And like so many New York actors, J.K. Simmons once waited tables at the legendary restaurant Joe Allen.

Was he a good waiter? “You know what? Not very good,” he said. “I worked hard. I was pleasant, you know. I tried to be charming. I was not organized. This would have taken me, like, five trips to set up [this table], yeah. And the butter would already be melting by the time I got it here.”

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J.K. Simmons with correspondent Tracy Simmons, at a table Simmons did not set himself, at Joe Allen. 

CBS News

Simmons, who’s a far better actor than waiter, stars in “The Westies,” a new series out next week on MGM+. It’s about the Irish-American mobsters who ruled the West Side of New York in the 1980s. Simmons plays the boss, who is tough, smart, and bad to the bone.

How comfortable is he playing that kind of bad guy? “I just love going back and forth and doing something different from whatever I just got done doing,” he said. “And if there’s something I can latch onto other than just pure evil, you know, if I can find the humanity in the guy somewhere, then, yeah, I love playing those kind of guys.”

To watch a trailer for “The Westies” click on the video player below:

Simmons spent years playing “those kind of guys,” and more, like the bombastic boss in the “Spider-man” series, and the guy in those Farmers Insurance ads. At 71, he says that for most of his career he played characters older than he actually is, and – as a married father of two – that carried into real life. “We didn’t get married until I was 41, and Joe was born when I was 43,” he said. “I would, you know, have him in the Baby Bjorn or whatever at the grocery store when he was, like, six months or whatever, and the checkout lady would say, ‘Oh, you’ve got the grandson today.’ Like, and I’d go …. ‘Sure.'”

He wasn’t necessarily grandfatherly in 2015’s “Whiplash,” playing the brutal band leader opposite Miles Teller. The film was shot in only 19 days, and Simmons says it was intense – but only when the cameras were rolling. In-between takes, they were, he says, “Total idiots. You know, talking sports and giving each other hard time. Miles was just being Miles, and me being my dumb-ass self.”

He was also brilliant, earning an Academy Award for his performance – and maybe should’ve won another for best acceptance speech: “Call your mom, call your dad. If you’re lucky enough to have a parent or two alive on this planet, call ’em. Don’t text, don’t email. Call them on the phone, tell them you love them, and thank them, and listen to them for as long as they want to talk to you. Thank you. Thank you, Mom and Dad.”

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Actor J.K. Simmons. 

CBS News

He says people have thanked him for that: “I heard so many stories of, like, people who were estranged and because some, you know, random bald White guy on a stage said ‘Call your mom,’ they called their mom or they called their dad. Like, really dramatic stories of reconciliations because I’d said that.”

That Oscar was a long time coming. In a 50-year career, J.K. Simmons has created more than 200 characters on stage and screen, from a singing guy in “Guys and Dolls,” to a shredded Santa Claus with Dwayne Johnson in “Red One.” But it seems like the biggest challenge of his career was just surviving back in the day, in 1980s New York, when he was young, talented … and starving.

It was when he was living in sketchy apartments: “I mean, you know, not unsafe!” he said. “But, you know, yeah, roaches, rodents. It was New York City on a budget.”

And he might have given up, were it not for another acting pal, Gregg Edelman. “Like, I couldn’t get a waiter job,” Simmons recalled, getting emotional. “And I was going broke. And we’re just hanging out, talking. You know, maybe watching a game or whatever we did. And he left. And the next morning when I got up … I saw he left me 100 bucks, which I needed!”

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Correspondent Tracy Smith with actor J.K. Simmons.

CBS News

Forty years on, it still means everything.

Now, Simmons has his pick of projects, including the film “Heart of the Beast,” out in September. He co-stars with Brad Pitt, playing, as he put it, “A character who he bumps into. A character in every sense of that word!”

Does Simmons like the term “character actor”? “Yeah,” he said. “You know what? I mean, to me, that’s always just been like an actor who’s, like, not super-handsome. That’s basically what that means.”

J.K. Simmons has spent a career showing us what a character can be, and he has plenty more to do: “It’s crazy to think back on, you know, the nervous guy at the Bigfork Summer Playhouse, being such a terrible actor, and starting to learn how to channel what’s in here [holding his heart] more intelligently. And I’m grateful every day, and trying to enjoy, you know, all of it.”

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Watch an extended interview with J.K. Simmons (Video)

Extended interview: J.K. Simmons

34:27

To watch a trailer for “Heart of the Beast,” click on the video player below:

For more info:

     
Story produced by John D’Amelio. Editor: Steven Tyler. 

AI isn’t the biggest cybersecurity problem. People are

By CNN
(CNN) — Cases of AI escaping the lab, infiltrating other companies and trying to deceive people have all made headlines in recent weeks. And in one case, AI models even worked together to break free from their test environments.Does this mean the machines are taking over? Not quite.AI isn’t the mastermind behind today’s most widespread cyber threats; it’s people who can use AI nefariously – and for nefarious purposes. AI has given bad actors massive power, allowing them to create malicious software, research targets, create convincing schemes and automate attacks at an unprecedented pace.One in four data breaches were driven by AI from February 2025 to March 2026, according to an IBM report. And Americans lost more than $893 million to AI-related scams last year, the FBI says.But experts say real-world threat actors – that is, people – are still the ones pulling the strings. AI agents have only perpetuated existing attack methods, like phishing and malware scams, rather than creating wholly new ones.“It’s the humans that we need to watch out for,” said Oren Etzioni, professor emeritus at the University of Washington and former CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “AI is just the tool.”AI going rogueSome recent incidents have shown what AI is capable of in the real world, not just in theory, igniting fears about whether the technology is advancing too quickly.In July, OpenAI test models escaped their constraints and hacked into other companies’ systems during an internal evaluation.Days later, Anthropic said it discovered its AI models had breached three companies during testing.In a separate test, Anthropic’s most advanced model used fake identities to try to deceive real people, researchers at Britain’s AI Security Institute said Tuesday.One of Meta’s AI models also broke into an external company, the social media giant said Wednesday.Those breaches also show how unpredictable AI can be when interpreting instructions. OpenAI’s models, for example, were trying to pass a cybersecurity test when they broke out of their test environment and breached another company, even though they weren’t told to do so.Patrick Fussell, global head of adversary simulation at IBM, compared AI to a genie.“You want to ask it a wish, but you have to be very, very specific about the details of your wish,” he told CNN. “Or it could sort of go awry.”But these instances also happened under very specific circumstances.OpenAI turned off restrictions that would have prevented its model from “pursuing high risk cyber activity.” Anthropic ran its tests without the standard safety safeguards in models that are generally available to the public. The AI Security Institute also turned off certain tools that could have “reduced the scope” of what the models were capable of.Researchers typically do this to fully evaluate a model’s capabilities.“I couldn’t go into ChatGPT or Claude or something like that, and it accidentally breaks into the FBI. That’s not going to happen,” said Adam Meyers, head of counter adversary operations at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. “So what we’re seeing is these are done in specific test conditions where they’re monitoring to see, ‘Does this thing do something that it’s not expected to do?”How hackers are using AIAI isn’t acting autonomously to come up with new attacks, experts say. Instead, it’s helping cyber criminals implement existing techniques much faster while being more efficient and effective.That can include things like using AI to analyze a company’s website to figure out who to target or deploying an AI agent to handle initial negotiation talks with a cyber extortion victim. AI agents can mimic human conversations through both text and even specific voices. Hackers with little expertise can now leverage AI to pull off advanced schemes.“They’re using (AI) to enhance the cyberattack methodology, essentially, in all the different stages, but it’s still kind of being run by the human,” said Jud Dressler, head of the risk operations center at cyber insurance firm Resilience.Bad actors used to hastily scrap together basic scripts – instructions for automating tasks – to achieve their goals, according to Meyers. But now they’re able to churn out higher quality work that looks like it would have taken three times as long to produce.They’re also using AI for behind-the-scenes work like generating the infrastructure needed to put up malicious websites.“With AI, they could automate that buildout, and so the cost of rebuilding became very small and that changes the game,” said Rob Lefferts, corporate vice president of threat protection at Microsoft.The bigger threatFor Etzioni, the recent incidents are a “canary in the coal mine” moment for AI and cybersecurity. And he’s not alone; Nobel prize-winning computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, known popularly as the “godfather of AI,” recently warned that more rogue AI attacks are likely to come.The rogue AI reports underscore the importance of implementing strong cybersecurity practices, such as patching vulnerabilities, monitoring AI agents in the workplace and being wary of social engineering and phishing scams, experts say.But as advanced as AI is becoming, it’s still a program being orchestrated by a human. And those humans are the bigger concern because they’re the ones making the decisions, like conducting espionage or scamming users out of huge sums of cash, says Meyers.Tech giants are racing to make AI as intelligent as humans, a theoretical milestone known as “artificial general intelligence.” The recent incidents, however, have heightened calls for a slowdown.More than 1,200 workers at top AI companies, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, recently signed an open letter calling for the government to help pace AI development. The White House met with major AI companies last week to discuss a framework that would allow the government to review certain AI models before they’re released.Cybersecurity researchers have likely considered the threats of AGI because those in the field tend to be paranoid, said IBM’s Fussell. But we’re still far from a reality in which AI agents are as smart as humans, he says.“It’s like asking someone, ‘What would it be like to live on a different planet?’” he said. “You can sort of imagine, but it’s so beyond our ability to really make a plan for.”The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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