J.K Simmons recalls the time he inadvertently HEAD-BUTTED Lupita Nyong’o while accepting his Oscar

Five years after winning his first Oscar for, J.K. Simmons opens up about the awkward moment where he head-butted Lupita Nyong’o on stage.

Nyong’o, who had won Best Supporting Actress a year earlier for her feature film debut in 12 Years A Slave, presented the Best Supporting Actor Award at the 2015 Academy Awards, which Simmons won for his powerful performance in Whiplash. 

Simmons was a guest on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, where he opened up about inadvertently head-butting Nyong’o on stage while accepting the award. 

‘There’s a billion people watching, and you’re in the Kodak theater with every famous actor you grew up watching, so I was a little nervous, and I never actually wrote an acceptance speech,’ he said on the podcast.

‘I had a theme in mind … and I wanted to talk about what’s most important in life, which is family,’ he said, adding he was ‘kind of formulating my thoughts’ while he was walking up to the stage.

‘Lupita Nyong’o was going to hand me the trophy and I reach out with one hand to take the trophy, and I reach out with the other hand to shake her hand, like we’re two dudes making a business deal, and then I realized, “Oh no, it’s Hollywood. You’re supposed to do the fake kiss on the cheek.”‘ he said.

‘So, I kind of awkwardly go in for the fake kiss on the cheek thing, and I gave her a little of a head butt. But [thankfully] not enough to take her down,’ he added.

He added that he knew right away what he had done, but he was just glad, ‘there wasn’t a house laugh, because it was subtle enough that most people didn’t notice.’

Simmons also joked that the head-butt ‘brought him back to Earth’ after a whirlwind awards season where he swept most of the major awards for playing abrasive music teacher Terence Fletcher in Whiplash.

Before his Oscar win, he had won Best Supporting Actor at the Golden Globes, BAFTA Awards, Screen Actors Guild Awards, Critics Choice Awards and Independent Spirit Awards, to name just a few. 

Ironically, Simmons had never been much of a fan of Oscars or awards season in general, adding he was talking to execs at Whiplash distributor Sony Pictures Classics and they were telling him he was likely going to get a lot of nominations.

‘I was like, “Yeah, no. Not interested. Thanks. I’ll be at home with my wife and kids or working on whatever is next,’ though he added frequent collaborator Jason Reitman (Up in the Air) made him realize why it was important.

‘I really had to kinda get talked into it, and it was Jason Reitman,’ who explained why he should participate in awards season.

Reitman told him that he should do it for everyone involved in the movie like his co-star Miles Teller and writer-director Damien Chazelle, before revealing the ‘real reason.’

‘He goes, “Everyone you’ve known your whole life, from your best friend in second grade before you moved away from Detroit to your fourth cousins, all of those people are going to be so excited and so thrilled for you. The people you were doing theater with in Buffalo in 1970. That really sunk into me, and my wife and I had a long heart-to-heart, because it’s a whole thing, the whole awards season. It’s like a real gauntlet that you have to commit to,’ Simmons shared.

He added that it became a ‘snowball rolling downhill’ and writer-director Damien Chazelle wrote him, ‘the part of a lifetime,’ en route to winning a slew of awards.