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    "headline": "J.K. Simmons calls his old mall Santa gig the worst job ever and says Red One was his redemption",
    "description": "J.K. Simmons said in an interview that working as a mall Santa was the worst job ever and that playing Santa Claus in Red One was his redemption.",
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    "articleBody": "Before J.K. Simmons played a muscle-bound Santa Claus opposite Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans in Red One, he did the job for real, in a shopping mall, on two packs of cigarettes a day. He has called it “the worst job ever,” and he describes the big-budget Christmas film as his chance to make up for it. “This is my redemption,” Simmons said in an interview around the film’s 2024 release. “I’ve come full circle, and I’ve been entrusted with embodying a really wonderful version of Santa Claus. So thank you to everybody for that.” Santa’s smoke breaks The mall gig came early, when Simmons was, in his words, a wannabe actor just out of college. He has no idea how he landed it. “I don’t know how the opportunity came up or why they were dumb enough to hire me to be a mall Santa Claus, but oh my God, it was the worst job ever,” he said. His own habits did not help. “First of all, I was smoking like two packs a day, and I’m sure the kids really enjoyed Santa’s smoker breath,” he recalled. Every ten minutes or so, he says, he was asking for a break to go and smoke. The children were not always thrilled either. Simmons estimates that at least a third of them were frightened of the bearded stranger in the costume, and that plenty of parents went home with photos of upset kids on his knee. “It was not fun,” he said. “I’ve tried to repress that memory for the last 44 years.” He told a similar story five years earlier, when he voiced Santa in the Netflix animated film Klaus. Back then he talked about one family photo in particular, of his sister and her boyfriend turning up to mock him, with the boyfriend, now his brother-in-law, perched on Santa’s lap reading out a wish list. What the public never sees, he said in that 2019 interview, is “just the level of pure exhaustion that it led to.” Three Santas, three very different jobs Simmons now has an unusual Santa resume. Here is how the three versions compare: The mall Santa: a young actor fresh out of college, real suit, real beard, real children, and a cigarette break every few minutes Klaus (2019): a voice role as a grieving, reclusive toymaker in Sergio Pablos’s hand-drawn origin story, which won best animated film at the BAFTAs and earned an Oscar nomination Red One (2024): a live-action, gym-built Santa who gets kidnapped on Christmas Eve and has to be rescued by Johnson’s North Pole security chief and Evans’s hacker For Klaus, Simmons said he deliberately left the mall memories at the door. “I did not take my mall Santa experience into the recording booth with me at all,” he said in 2019. How Red One did Directed by Jake Kasdan, Red One opened internationally on November 6, 2024, and in US theaters on November 15. It topped the North American box office with a $32.1 million opening but ended with $186 million worldwide against a reported budget of $200 million to $250 million, so on Badiyaa’s math it fell somewhere between $14 million and $64 million short of its production cost alone, before marketing. Streaming told a different story. Red One drew 50 million views worldwide in its first four days on Prime Video in December 2024, and it was the only live-action film on one ranking of the ten most-streamed movies of that year. The Christmas movie season is filling up again this year. Johnny Depp takes on Scrooge in a new version of A Christmas Carol, as we reported in our story on Johnny Depp’s Ebenezer featurette, and a darker holiday tale is on the way, covered in our piece on Aaron Pierre’s Christmas Eve thriller Fairytale in New York. Red One heads into its third holiday season on Prime Video this December, two years after Simmons finally got to wear the suit on his own terms. Further reading Wikipedia: Red One (film) Wikipedia: Klaus (film) Image: Redxonard, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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