Veep's Timothy Simons looks back on seven years of Jonah Ryan

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

NPR

Society & Culture

4.7 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 28 May 2019

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Veep is a show full of despised, incompetent and unlikable characters. And is there anyone less likable, more incompetent than Jonah Ryan? Played by Timothy Simons, the tall, petty and mercurial Jonah went from a lowly white house staffer to New Hampshire's least popular members of Congress to long-shot presidential contender. Simons explains why thick skin doesn't always protect you from all of Veep's famously devastating insults. Plus, how being a dad has impacted his acting career and knowledge of elementary school handball.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.
0:12.4	I'm Jesse Thorn, it's Bullseye.
0:14.4	When he was 30 years old, Timothy Simons and his wife moved to Los Angeles from Chicago.
0:26.4	Simons was acting in Chicago but mostly in theater and in Chicago, he could see the ceiling on his career.
0:35.4	Almost touching.
0:36.4	Simons wanted to be in front of a camera, so he moved out to Hollywood.
0:41.4	No job, not much money saved up, that was about 10 years ago.
0:46.4	He gets his first major role pretty quickly after that, a really major role actually.
0:52.4	He was cast on HBO's Veepe.
0:54.4	Veepe just wrapped its seventh and final season, it was great.
0:58.4	Veepe is of course a show about people who work in politics.
1:01.4	It's starred Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the former vice president, Selena Meyer.
1:06.4	She and pretty much everyone around her are all terrible people.
1:09.4	They're petty, selfish, scared and incompetent.
1:13.4	And there's probably nobody on the show, more petty, selfish, scared and incompetent than Timothy Simons' character.
1:20.4	Jonah Ryan.
1:21.4	Jonah starts the show as a lowly staffer in the West Wing.
1:25.4	Then he gets fired.
1:26.4	Then he gets elected to Congress.
1:28.4	Then he at the start of this final season becomes a presidential candidate facing off against Selena.
1:35.4	He's anti-vaccine, anti-immigration and anti-math.
1:40.4	Here's a little bit of his stump's bitch.
	...

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