J.K. Simmons has never played his own games but calls Portal 2 script good enough for a feature film

J.K. Simmons appeared on the Happy Sad Confused podcast and confirmed he has never actually played Baldur's Gate 3 or any other game he has voiced — but he has a clear favorite among them, and it's Portal 2.

Asked whether he engages with games at all, Simmons was blunt: "My hands don't work on those controllers." His twentysomething kids play regularly, and his wife will jump into Mario Bros. with them, but Simmons himself is out. The Baldur's Gate 3 connection did surface in his life recently, though — actor Tom Britney texted him a video of his in-game character and wrote "I'm about to kill you." Simmons' response: "Okay, well, good luck with that." On Portal 2, where he voiced Aperture Science founder Cave Johnson, Simmons was effusive: "It was such a hilarious script. I could have done the feature film, or the play, or whatever. It was just such fun writing." He reprised the Cave Johnson role for Aperture Desk Job, the 2022 Steam Deck tie-in, alongside returning Portal 2 writer Eric Wolpaw.

Simmons is far from alone in having a complicated relationship with the medium he works in. Voice actors land across the whole spectrum — Deus Ex and Starfield actor Elias Toufexis is a committed gamer, while Silent Hill f actor Konatsu Kato streamed her first playthrough of the game she starred in. On the other end, GTA 5 actor Steven Ogg has publicly suggested people put down controllers and pick up Dostoevsky instead. Simmons sits somewhere in the middle: genuinely enthusiastic about the writing craft behind games, just unable to actually play them.

The comments are a light but telling window into how Hollywood talent experiences game work — often in isolation from the final product, judging it purely on the script. For Portal 2 fans, hearing Simmons still talk about Cave Johnson's writing with that much warmth more than a decade later is its own kind of endorsement.