Take, for example, the deceptively interesting all-black workout outfit that Simmons wore out in Manhattan on Tuesday. Let’s start with his skull-printed navy hoodie from Under Armour’s Project Rock collaboration with Dwayne Johnson, who was Simmons’s co-star in the 2024 holiday action flick, Red One. Layered on top was a navy letterman jacket with black leather sleeves and an embroidered Law & Order logo, nodding to Simmons’s 13-year-long recurring role as Dr. Emil Skoda, a police psychiatrist, across three of the franchise’s series. (You can find a version of the jacket on Italian eBay for $200.)
On the bottom half, a dad classic: waffle-knit sweatpants and Asics Gel-Nimbus 25s in dark blue. He rolled up the hem of one sweatpant leg up to his knee, revealing a knee-high, two-stripe black sock. Perhaps he was simply biking, doing some sort of cycling exercise in preparation for his rumored reprisal in next year’s Spiderman: Brand New Day. Or perhaps he was paying homage to the hip-hop greats of the ’90s, when the likes of LL Cool J and A Tribe Called Quest’s Q Tip were often seen with a single pant leg rolled up, exposing a bare calf.
Tucked discreetly under the actor’s hood was a black baseball cap with the ominous inscription: “You can’t run forever,” which is, in case you were not familiar, the title of the 2024 thriller, You Can’t Run Forever, in which Simmons played a serial killer named Wade who hunts down a young woman suffering from acute anxiety.
What’s especially funny, though, is the possibility that Simmons may have received at least a few of these items—the Project Rock hoodie; the promotional Law & Order jacket and You Can’t Run Forever cap—for free.
Free stuff is hard to resist. What state would my keyboard be in without the Spectrum-branded computer brush acquired at a Climate Week booth last year? How strong would my cap collection be without the floppy Martini & Rossi baseball cap I was handed at a sponsored party, sadly, after the open bar had closed? How would we physically commemorate all the different stages of a career without the free corporate pens and mugs we collected along the way?
Surely Simmons knows exactly what I’m talking about. This isn’t the first instance of Simmons sporting a promotional accessory this year; at a film screening in January, he donned a baseball cap inscribed with the title of his 2017 project, I’m Not Here.
Perhaps there is a universe in which the fictional characters from Simmons’s promotional merch could cross paths. (Skoda would probably have a lot to say about Wade’s psyche.) But for now, that reality exists solely in this diabolical gym fit.