James Edison Darmody is a fictional character in the television show Boardwalk Empire, played by Michael Pitt.
Jimmy is the son of Atlantic City political boss Commodore Louis Kaestner (Dabney Coleman) and showgirl Gillian Darmody (Gretchen Mol).
Nucky eventually took over the Commodore's political machine and set Jimmy up for great success when he grew up.
[3] In Season 2, it is revealed that he joined the Army because he felt guilty about a drunken sexual encounter with his mother and because he likely faced expulsion from college after assaulting a professor who had made a pass at her.
[5] In January 1920, Jimmy had recently moved back to Atlantic City after recovering from his war injury.
He displayed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder from memories of the trench warfare and refused to go back to school.
Frustrated that he is not doing more, he and Al Capone (Stephen Graham) hijack a shipment of bootlegged liquor that Nucky sold to Arnold Rothstein (Michael Stuhlbarg) and gun down the drivers.
[8] Jimmy returns to Atlantic City with Richard Harrow (Jack Huston), a disfigured marksman whom he met in a military hospital in Chicago.
[12] Jimmy is put in a difficult position when his partners in the bootlegging business — Capone, Lucky Luciano (Vincent Piazza) and Meyer Lansky (Anatol Yusef) — pressure him to kill Nucky.
[13] Jimmy enters a deal with Philadelphia gangster Manny Horvitz (William Forsythe) to supply him alcohol.
However, Nucky has Owen Sleater (Charlie Cox), a former IRA assassin, blow up the warehouse where Jimmy's liquor is stored.
He ends up buying medicinal alcohol from George Remus (Glenn Fleshler) and uses it to make whiskey.
Nucky's bootlegging operation flourishes, while Jimmy and his partners are left with an inferior product and nobody to sell it to.
[4] Jimmy tries to make amends with Nucky, and he and Harrow help him with his election fraud case by killing the main witness for the prosecution, Alderman Jim Neary (Robert Clohessy), and staging it to look like a suicide.
[23] In order to accommodate Coleman's condition, the Commodore's screen time was reduced and Jimmy became the replacement leader of the rebellion against Nucky.
"[24] Winter stated that his goal was to mislead the audience into thinking Jimmy and Nucky would reconcile and there would be a happy ending.
"[24] After the season two finale, rumors began circulating that Jimmy was killed off because Pitt was difficult to work with.
[24][25] Michael Pitt, along with the rest of the cast of Boardwalk Empire, won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series in 2010 and 2011.
Pitt was also nominated for a Monte-Carlo Television Festival Award for Outstanding Actor in a Drama Series.
[26] Soon after the show's debut, the Los Angeles Times reported an increased demand for Jimmy's hairstyle — a trimmed buzz-cut short on the sides, left long on the top and swept back from the forehead — at barber shops in the United States.