On the occasion of our conversation, Westworld star Jimmi Simpson’s hit show is three days away from airing its twistiest episode yet. (“It’s a humdinger,” he says.) Although that big reveal—Bernard is a robot!—is a minor contrivance compared to the shocking political upset that rocked our nation earlier that week. Simpson, like many artists, was vocal about his fear and loathing of now-President-elect Donald Trump throughout the campaign. Speaking on the phone from Los Angeles less than 48 hours after Trump’s historic victory, Simpson is struggling to summon self-promotional patter.
“When you’re a thoughtful person and you’re in an industry that’s mixed up with a whole bunch of shallow folk, you do start to wonder what the value is of what you’re offering,” he confides, adding that he often turns to his military brother’s encouragement that everyone needs quality entertainment “to decompress and escape from how hard life always is.”
He also takes solace in the knowledge that Westworld, which flips Michael Crichton’s same-named 1973 film on its head by asking us to root for the titular theme park’s robot “hosts” in their quest to wrest humanity from demagogue creators, isn’t exactly passive. “This show is not some kind of pacifier,” Simpson elaborates. “It all rings true. Talk about galvanizing—it’s bringing us together in a consciousness, and that’s just what we missed this election.”
For anyone suspicious that Simpson is your typical La La Land leftie, he was born and raised in rural Hackettstown, New Jersey (yes, it was originally christened the Garden State for a reason) alongside two older brothers, by parents who “had no expectation for me besides what I wanted.” He pursued a passion for theater at nearby Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania and spent the better part of a decade toiling in Hollywood before breaking through with a recurring, fan-favorite role as slothful Liam McPoyle on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. More prominent parts in Breakout Kings and The Newsroom, among others, secured his status as a working actor, but 2016—which he bookended with turns as Euro-trance-loving lunatic killer Soldier on SundanceTV’s underappreciated Hap and Leonard and Westworld’s ostensible protagonist, William—has elevated Simpson into a very different conversation. But he swears that wasn’t by design. For that matter, “Not even close.”
“Somehow I surrounded myself with folks for a very long time,” he continues. “I’m loyal by default. We treat each other like family. None of us have ever been headed toward breakthrough stardom. I think they took me on never expecting any kind of leg up, and their job’s been made a shade easier right now. That’s just a pleasure for me to offer them, but everything was serendipitous. Hap and Leonard was the result of me choosing to do a play before that instead of going into pilot season. That play completely activated me, and the day after the play wrapped, I went out for Hap and Leonard. In the two days I got back from Hap and Leonard, I got a Westworld audition, and I was activated from that prior job. It really was not a plan. It just happened to be opportunity arising, and I happened to be ready for it.”