Timothy Simons spent seven seasons as the most disliked man on television, and now viewers are rooting for him as a romantic lead. The actor, best known as Jonah Ryan on HBO’s Veep, talked about that change in direction in a new interview on The Daily Beast’s Obsessed podcast, which was published on October 31.
Timothy Simons played Jonah Ryan, a loud and graceless White House aide who later won a seat in Congress, across all seven seasons of Veep from 2012 to 2019. The part was his first major television role, and it made him a familiar face to comedy fans. Jonah was written to be insulted by almost every other character on the show, and Simons leaned into it.
Timothy Simons and the Jonah Ryan years
The role of Jonah Ryan shaped Timothy Simons in ways that still follow him. He appeared in 65 episodes of Veep, and he shared in the cast’s Screen Actors Guild Award for ensemble work in a comedy series in 2017, after five more nominations in the same category between 2013 and 2016. The show’s writers built whole scenes around the insults other characters aimed at Jonah, and clips of those exchanges still draw large audiences online.
Simons was born on June 12, 1978, in Readfield, Maine, and studied theater at the University of Maine, graduating in 2001. He moved to Los Angeles in 2008 and worked in commercials before a GEICO advertisement in which he played Abraham Lincoln brought Timothy Simons to the attention of a casting director for Veep. He auditioned several times and was cast in December 2010. Veep premiered in April 2012, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Vice President Selina Meyer.
Timothy Simons finds a new role in Nobody Wants This
The turn in Timothy Simons came with Netflix’s Nobody Wants This, in which he plays Sasha Roklov, the older brother of Adam Brody’s Noah and the husband of Esther. The show’s second season arrived on October 23, 2025, and it gave Sasha a story of his own, as he tried to win Esther back after she decided to separate. Sasha is good hearted but flawed, and he holds on too tightly to a marriage that is coming apart.
Collider called Sasha the show’s true heartthrob in season 2, a sharp change from the hot rabbi tag that belonged to Brody’s Noah in the first season. A second strand of the season pairs Sasha with Morgan, played by Justine Lupe, in a friendship that Simons described to Today.com as an “undefinable connection.” The two characters test the limits of that friendship across the season, and it became one of the most talked about parts of the new episodes.
On the Obsessed podcast, host Kevin Fallon asked Timothy Simons about that shift, from a character audiences loved to hate to one they want to see happy. Simons also talked about the insults from Veep that still follow him years later, and about the odd likeness between Jonah Ryan and JD Vance, now the vice president. He said the ways in which real politics have started to resemble Veep make the show’s satire feel stranger now than it did when it aired.
What else he has done since Veep
Simons has kept a varied schedule since Veep ended. He appeared in the sixth season of The Handmaid’s Tale as Commander Bell, a high ranking official in Gilead, and he has taken film roles in comedies and dramas, including Don’t Worry Darling in 2022. He also appeared on Celebrity Jeopardy, where he told host Ken Jennings about the anxiety attacks he had before the show.
Timothy Simons has said the Veep insults never bothered him. “I knew what I was signing up for,” he told the University of Maine alumni magazine. “Now when my family watches they can’t wait for the next insult.” That attitude helped him through seven seasons of playing a character written to be disliked, and it left him free to take a part like Sasha, where the audience is asked to care about him.
Where to watch
Both seasons of Nobody Wants This are streaming on Netflix, with Kristen Bell and Adam Brody in the lead roles and Erin Foster as creator. The new Obsessed episode with Timothy Simons is available now, and it runs through his Veep years, the Sasha role, and the way one part can define an actor long after the show ends.