J.K. Simmons is certainly not afraid to tackle a variety of roles on screen, and his latest may go down as the weirdest one to date. According to reports, the next time you see Simmons he will be torturing someone in a Lovecraftian horror movie with a public bathroom glory hole involved.
The film, Glorious, comes from director Rebekah McKendry and is slated to premiere at Fantasia later this year. And as Variety details, the plot of Glorious revolves around that thing we’ve all done a time or two before: waiting out a hangover locked in a public restroom?
The film follows Wes (Kwanten) as he waits out a hangover locked in a public restroom with a mysterious entity (Simmons) behind a glory hole. Co-written by Joshua Hull, David Ian McKendry and Todd Rigney, the story takes Wes deep into his own psyche as he wrestles with fate and a glimpse of the unthinkable in this Lovecraft-inspired comic horror.
OK, so perhaps not as relatable as you may think. But it certainly does sound… weird. Which is what everyone involved is going for here. In the Variety interview with McKendry, the director alluded to “an eight-foot-tall teddy bear with a giant vagina in its chest” appearing in the film. But at least, apparently, Simmons’ performance will start out as normal before things totally go off the rails.
Even in the early stages, the biggest thing for me was that the guy in the bathroom could not sound scary from the start. It needs to sound like a guy in a bathroom stall next to you. It needs to sound cordial and friendly and he can’t sound scary. There has to be a reason that Wes wants to keep talking to him. And so J. K.’s voice is perfect because he’s just so multifaceted.
And as we’ve seen in Whiplash, Simmons certainly knows how to warp the emotions of someone on screen with his words and tone. So it all sounds promising, to say the least. Let’s just hope nothing terrifying comes out of the toilets and ruins our water closet routines once and for all. Oh… oh no. That’s definitely going to happen, isn’t it?
[via Variety]