Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Everett Collection (Netflix/Channel 4/Love Prod., Dana Edelson/NBC, Philippe Bosse/Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox), Getty Images (Paramount, Earl Gibson III/Deadline), Josh Brasted/FilmMagic, Paul Bergen/Redferns
A little over a decade ago, America got to know Timothy Simons through his not-so-lovable turn as Veep’s Jonah, a punching bag of a character so hatable that he was called “Jolly Green Jizzface,” “Frankenstein’s Monster, if the monster was made out of dead dicks,” and about a million other put-down pearls. But while Simons has appeared in a whole bunch of other very grown-up material since then, including Netflix’s Nobody Wants This and the upcoming Scream 7, he’s also been in a surprising amount of family-friendly material. He voiced a biker in Ralph Breaks the Internet and Tommy’s dad, Drew Pickles, in the Paramount+ Rugrats relaunch. And more recently, in the new season of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Simons has given Camp Half-Blood’s vaguely evil new head, King Tantalus, a bit of bloodthirsty swagger, as well as Robert Smith–style hair and a touch of pathos.
Some of Simons’s drive to do family-friendly projects could come from the decade-plus he’s spent parenting his twins, Marty and Hopper. “It’s always fun to do something my kids can not only see, but also something that they might actually like or know about,” Simons says, noting that part of the impetus for taking on the Tantalus role was the week his kids spent at a day camp in L.A. themed around the Percy Jackson books. (Simons even tried to bring his kids to Canada to see the filming of Percy Jackson’s season-two chariot races, though he couldn’t make the timing work with the pair’s school schedule.)
But maybe one day it will all work out, especially if Simons’s kids keep expressing interest in getting into the arts. “There’s always a dream that I have of doing something like [Percy] that films in the summertime, so we can all do our little traveling-circus thing for a couple weeks on location,” he says. “If anything, it should just really drill home how boring it is to be on set. Like, Oh, really? You want to be an actor? How big of a fan are you of waiting around for a long time?”
Here’s what Simons watches and listens to with his kids when he’s not off somewhere waiting around alone.
Photo: Netflix/Channel 4/Love Prod./Everett Collection
The most popular thing with my kids right now is Taskmaster. I think it speaks to their desire for funny chaos. They love seeing people try to solve a puzzle in the weirdest or most creative way, so that’s been huge in our house.
Actually, when we started watching Taskmaster, my kids felt an immediate kinship with it because they’re also into The Great British Baking Show and Noel Fielding is or was on both, so they got to have that feeling of being like, Ah, yes, I’m familiar with his work. I know what he’s about.
My wife and I have always really liked Baking Show too, so we had a really lovely family routine going on Friday nights when this past season was on. And while my kids liked everyone who was in the final three, they were really disappointed when Iain Ross, the short Irish king, was eliminated. I mean, that was a hard night in our household. Both of them were like, “I don’t know if I can continue watching.”
Photo: Dana Edelson/NBC/Everett Collection
My kids are also becoming little comedy nerds, so we’ll record Saturday Night Live and watch it on Sunday nights as a family. It’s been really great, although there are a lot of jokes that we have to pause and explain to them, especially during “Weekend Update” when they’re dealing with high-level political stuff. I feel like I always end up being like, “I don’t even know how to tell you what the Department of the Interior is.”
I played in the American Century golf tournament up in Lake Tahoe this year. It’s a really fun thing, and there are lots of athletes and actors that play in it, and one of them was Colin Jost. My daughter asked me no fewer than 75 times if she could meet him, and on the very last day, she finally did. He was very gracious about it, and now we have a picture of her and Colin Jost.
Photo: Everett Collection
We’ve had a tradition for a while of doing what we call “Papa movie nights,” where, if my wife is working or if she’s out of the house, I will choose a movie. And, of course, this is always met with groans, and the kids think they’re not going to like whatever I pick. When they were younger, I’d pick stuff like Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, but now that my kids are a little older, we can watch almost anything together. Recently, I showed them 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time, and we just watched Mad Max: Fury Road together.
Being able to introduce them to movies is really exciting for me as a movie fan, and specifically as somebody who grew up being pretty fanatical about movie-watching in general. It’s been really fun to introduce them to things that have a history to them or that have stuck around for a reason.
I collect Blu-rays and 4Ks, so some of “Papa movie night” is specifically about what I’ve been waiting to show them, but other times, I’ll just go to the library and think, What’s the mood tonight? It’s fun to try to figure out the best thing to watch for a particular vibe. I’m never so locked in on an idea for a movie that I won’t budge. Like, I had to wait for the right time to show 2001. There are definitely nights where it needs to be light and fun and not too taxing. It’s exciting to flip through, find something, and think, This will be the absolute perfect movie for tonight.
Photo: Paramount/Getty Images
My wife is a big fan of some of the classic Hitchcock movies, and her favorite is Rear Window, so we watched that with the kids. And even though editing from the 1950s or ’60s moves a lot slower than stuff made for this generation, they were so into it, and that made me happy. Even when something isn’t designed for today’s kids, the story and the performances were still so riveting that it couldn’t help but keep their attention.
Photo: Philippe Bosse/Paramount Pictures Everett Collection
I’m in Scream 7, which comes out in February, and I’m a huge fan of that franchise. Always have been. I rewatch all of them once every couple years, and now they’ve expressed interest in seeing them too. While my son is more into horror movies than my daughter, who I think would self-describe as a little bit of a scaredy-cat, over the course of the next few months, I think we’re going to try to watch them all.
We already started with the original and it was great, though we did have to make an agreement that we were going to watch it during the day so that they wouldn’t have to try to go to sleep once it was done. And my daughter, in an act of self-preservation, had to plug her ears the entire movie so she couldn’t hear anything, meaning we had to watch it with subtitles on.
Photo: Buena Vista Pictures/Everett Collection
It’s been interesting to have conversations with my kids about archetypes when we watch older movies, like, “These are the horror-movie tropes that this movie is playing off,” or “This director actually invented a lot of these horror tropes and then reinvented them with this movie.” It was the same thing when we watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, too; that made me really happy because it was a great way to introduce film-noir tropes to them in a way that wasn’t like, “Hey, guys, we’re gonna watch Kiss Me Deadly tonight.” It’s like, “We’re going to introduce this to you now and then later, you’re going to recognize these things again when you end up watching film-noir movies.”
Photo: 20th Century Fox/Everett Collection
My son also loves a sequel. We were able to show them Die Hard last year, which they both loved, but whenever he watches a movie, he’ll be like, “Is there a sequel?” I think it’s because, like a lot of kids, he loves rewatching things. There’s verifiable comfort there. They found it watching Curious George episodes over and over when they were younger, then Bluey, and now rewatching Die Hard and its sequels.
Related to that, I was able to have a conversation with my son about how, even if a movie doesn’t have a sequel, a director might return to the same theme or they might return to the same world or worldview. And so even if it’s not a direct sequel, you might find the same feeling that you’re looking for by asking, “Is there a sequel to this?” in some of that person’s other work.
We went to see The Running Man when it was in theaters, and afterward, when he asked if there was going to be a sequel, I said, “I don’t know, but if you liked that, Edgar Wright has made a lot of other movies that I think you would really enjoy.” It’s fun to be able to have that kind of conversation with them now, rather than when they were younger and you’d have to say, “No, there isn’t a sequel. I can’t give you the thing that you want.”
Photo: Josh Brasted/FilmMagic
My wife is a public-school teacher, so I handle most of the dropping the kids off at school in the mornings because she has to be in school at the same time that the bell is ringing for our kids. And in our car, whoever is in the front seat gets to play the music, and that alternates day-to-day.
So we have gone through Taylor Swift phases with both kids, during which I learned a lot about Taylor because I had never really heard any of her songs before. More recently, Eminem had a huge comeback with middle-schoolers for some reason. There was a really long Green Day kick with my son, too, and a really long Benson Boone kick with my daughter. Right now, they are both into a guy called BoyWithUke.
When my kids were in elementary school, somebody introduced them to a cappella and that’s all we could listen to, and that was rough. I ended up telling another parent that I would have rather someone introduced my kids to fentanyl because that would have been a more preferable outcome.
There are definitely days when I’ll do the impatient-parenting thing where I’ll say, “I know one of you is sitting in the front, but we’re just going to have some quiet.” Like, I know they find comfort in repetition, but when they repeat the same Benson Boone song four times in an 11-minute car ride, it’s like, “I’m going to drive this car into the reservoir and there’s not a jury in this country that would convict me.”
Getting middle-schoolers who just want to text their friends to read books can be challenging, but on road trips, we started listening to the audiobooks of Little House on the Prairie and Little House in the Big Woods, and our daughter loves relistening to those. They are narrated by Cherry Jones, and they’re incredible.
Actually, that relates to another Papa movie night: There was a period of time where I was like, “I’m going to introduce these guys to caper movies with The Sting.” After that, we went on to Ocean’s movies. In Ocean’s Twelve when Cherry Jones shows up as Matt Damon’s mother, I paused the scene and was like, “Guys, I just want you to listen to this woman’s voice and let me know if anything comes up.” Four seconds in, my daughter’s jaw dropped to the floor, and she was so excited. It’s like she had just become a lifelong fan of the work of Cherry Jones.