Articles by Savannah Sobrevilla

Technology

J.K. Simmons Is the New King of the Dirtbag Gym Fit

Some of the greatest entertainers of our time have undergone later-in-life style transformations. Think of, say, the flashy fashion of Steve Harvey, 68, or Jeff Goldblum, 73. The ever-stylish Daniel Day-Lewis, 68, is a swag chameleon. But Oscar winner J.K. Simmons seems to have taken a different, more brooding tack on his personal style journey. Since getting yoked nearly a decade ago, the 70-year-old actor has quietly honed his gym-ready dust fit into its optimized form. Take, for example, the deceptively interesting all-black workout outfit that Simmons wore out in Manhattan on Tuesday. Let’s start with his skull-printed navy hoodie from Under Armour’s Project Rock collaboration with Dwayne Johnson, who was Simmons’s co-star in the 2024 holiday action flick, Red One. Layered on top was a navy letterman jacket with black leather sleeves and an embroidered Law & Order logo, nodding to Simmons’s 13-year-long recurring role as Dr. Emil Skoda, a police psychiatrist, across three of the franchise’s series. (You can find a version of the jacket on Italian eBay for $200.) On the bottom half, a dad classic: waffle-knit sweatpants and Asics Gel-Nimbus 25s in dark blue. He rolled up the hem of one sweatpant leg up to his knee, revealing a knee-high, two-stripe black sock. Perhaps he was simply biking, doing some sort of cycling exercise in preparation for his rumored reprisal in next year’s Spiderman: Brand New Day. Or perhaps he was paying homage to the hip-hop greats of the ’90s, when the likes of LL Cool J and A Tribe Called Quest’s Q Tip were often seen with a single pant leg rolled up, exposing a bare calf. Tucked discreetly under the actor’s hood was a black baseball cap with the ominous inscription: “You can’t run forever,” which is, in case you were not familiar, the title of the 2024 thriller, You Can’t Run Forever, in which Simmons played a serial killer named Wade who hunts down a young woman suffering from acute anxiety. What’s especially funny, though, is the possibility that Simmons may have received at least a few of these items—the Project Rock hoodie; the promotional Law & Order jacket and You Can’t Run Forever cap—for free. Free stuff is hard to resist. What state would my keyboard be in without the Spectrum-branded computer brush acquired at a Climate Week booth last year? How strong would my cap collection be without the floppy Martini & Rossi baseball cap I was handed at a sponsored party, sadly, after the open bar had closed? How would we physically commemorate all the different stages of a career without the free corporate pens and mugs we collected along the way? Surely Simmons knows exactly what I’m talking about. This isn’t the first instance of Simmons sporting a promotional accessory this year; at a film screening in January, he donned a baseball cap inscribed with the title of his 2017 project, I’m Not Here. Perhaps there is a universe in which the fictional characters from Simmons’s promotional merch could cross paths. (Skoda would probably have a lot to say about Wade’s psyche.) But for now, that reality exists solely in this diabolical gym fit.