JK Simmons is truly burning the wick at both ends of the comic book movie world right now, by playing both Commissioner Gordon in the DCEU, and returning to the role of J. Jonah Jameson in the MCU Spider-Man movies. The actor has spoken recently about the former of those roles, and how the new Batgirl movie shows a new side to his character.
In a recent interview with Collider to promote his new fantasy movie Night Sky, the world of superhero movies naturally came up, and Simmons spoke very candidly of his involvement in both the MCU movies, and the DCEU movies.
Simmons first appeared in comic book movies back in the 2000s, playing the mean media mogul J. Jonah Jameson to Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker. He reprised the role for the MCU timeline more recently in Tom Holland’s Spider-Man trilogy. In between those two iterations of Jameson, Simmons also signed up to the DCEU to take on the iconic role of Gotham’s Police Commissioner, appearing in two Justice League movies so far.
“Batgirl was a treat, for a number of reasons. My little bit in Justice League was, at the time, meant to be, ‘Look, we’re gonna introduce this guy, and we’re gonna see more of him in the future.’ I didn’t have a whole lot to do,” Simmons explained. “In Batgirl, because of the relationship between Commissioner Gordon and his daughter, it’s much more of a domestic aspect of Jim Gordon.”
“We do get to see some fun, out in the street. Well, I’m gonna stop now because I really don’t wanna do any spoilers,” Simmons said. “But it was fun to do the stuff with Leslie Grace, who plays Batgirl, and get to portray a different aspect of Jim Gordon, other than as Commissioner Gordon,” the actor concluded.
The Batgirl movie will be released in 2022, though no official release date has been confirmed just yet. The movie will eventually drop on the streaming service HBO Max, and will star Leslie Grace, Michael Keaton, Brendan Fraser, and JK Simmons, of course.