Simon Rex: From gay-ish porn to homophobic comedy to gay necrophilia to Bupkis

I don't know who Simon Rex is, except that he starred in Down Low, a Netflix bait-and-switch movie where everybody dies, and maybe Jackass?  But seeing or hearing his name gives me a vaguely disquieting, uncomfortable sensation, as if there's something wrong about him.  Let's do some research to find out why. 

Wikipedia gives a full, lenthy biography.  Born in San Francisco in 1974, started out modeling nude and wanking in four gay porn videos -- not having sex with any guys, just wanking.  Wikipedia mentions his girlfriend right off to assure readers that it's ok, he's straight, he never did any actual gay stuff.

Maybe that's where the disquiet comes from -- reading articles that mention his "disreputable" and "sleazy" past, without specifying that it's just some j/o videos.

He's not bad looking here. 

Modeling gigs for Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfinger followed.

In 1995, at age 21, Simon became a VJ, like a disc jockey for videos, on MTV.  He says that this  made him a household name, "because I was on tv every day from 3-4."  Prime after-school time.

  

The VJ gig lasted for only two years, but it pushed Simon into a movie career:

He played "Slab O' Beef" in Shriek if You Know What I did Last Friday the 13th.

George Logan, a rapper/ women's boxing promoter in Scary Movie 3 and 4.  He commits suicide by overdosing on Viagra and jumping off a  balcony.  Also, there's a lot of homophobic rhetoric.

National Lampoon's Pledge This  is about the breasts of college girls. Simon plays Derek, who dumps one college girl with breasts when he falls in love with another.  A review notes that it presents lesbians as sexual predators and gay men as easily turned straight by the right pair of breasts.

I'm getting an idea of the reason for the disquiet.

His days of frontal nudity far behind, Simon rarely even took his shirt off. Here's one of the few examples, in Boy Toy, 2011. 

The title is misleading: it's not a gay movie.  It's about an unsuccessful but well hung underwear model who tries a new career as a gigolo. No, we don't see his dick.

2020s dick after the break. Warning: explicit.

Red Rocket, 2021, won some awards for Simon's portrayal of a "cancerous loser," metaphorically, that is: he's a washed-up  straight porn star who returns to his small home town in Texas to re-unite with his estranged wife, and starts sexing with a 17-year old girl named Strawberry.  

He runs naked through an industrial wasteland in one scene, but he used a prosthetic cock.  In spite of his gay-ish porn in the past, Simon is not really big enough down there to play a believable porn star.

I reviewed Down Low, 2023, a "painfully humorless dark comedy" in which a hookup goes terribly wrong, and homicidal gay guys kill for no reason, then have sex.  Simon plays Buck, a gay necrophiliac whom the guys hire to have sex with and then dispose of the first body.  

He has a guest spot on the tv series Bupkis,2023, Jewish slang for "nothing."  It's an 8-episode semi-fictionalized story of Pete Davidson's life. Simon plays "an eccentric jeweler "named Crispy.

Is the tattooed dude really famous enough to get an 8-episode biopic?  Apparently, since he managed to talk a lot of famous buds into guest roles: Brad Garrett, Ray Romano, Bobby Cannavale, Jon Stewart, Jane Curtin, John Mulaney, and...Al Gore?

Simon may be bi in real life: he writes on Facebook that  "I don't have a gay bone in my body -- unless you count my boyfriends."  Har har.  

If you like guys, why are you appearing in so many homophobic movies, Simon?

A still from one of his early j/o movies doesn't help.  I still get that feeling of quiet dread at the name "Simon Rex."

See also: Down Low: Netflix bait and switch movie that turns a gay hookup into something dark.  With Simon Rex's dick

Bobby and Jake Cannivale: Nude photos of the father and son, not in prison or the Mafia