‘I don’t want to take these characters home’: Jesse Plemons on life playing the psychopath next door
Jesse Plemons …. ‘I find it tricky talking about acting’. Photograph: Giulia Parmigiani
Jesse Plemons is a successful young actor, instinctive and natural, who likes to inhabit every role he takes on. He can play lead or support; light comedy or dark drama; the cornfed all-American or his curdled, troubled cousin. The 36-year-old can handle any part, it seems, except that of Jesse Plemons, a successful young actor with a new film to promote. Now, all at once, he is ill at ease. He regards the hotel couch as though it’s a dentist’s chair. “These are two completely different skills,” he confides. “Acting, I mean, and whatever we’re doing right now.”
He has worked as an actor since he was a kid, and figured he’d found a comfortable level of fame, strolling from Coke commercials to roles in Friday Night Lights and Breaking Bad. Yet all the while he has been like the apocryphal frog in the pan, coming to the boil without realising. “This is taking some time to navigate,” he says, “being in the public eye. Doing interviews. Somehow trying to have a human conversation.”
We meet amid the glitz and din of the Cannes film festival, an environment not naturally suited to human conversation. Plemons is here for the premiere of Kinds of Kindness, an off-kilter nightmare of modern American life, a film that he can’t even begin to explain. He felt lost while he was making it and eventually decided that might be OK. “As an actor – as a human – your instinct is always to make sense of a story. But with this, you almost have to give in to the feeling of being lost. If you look at the characters in Kinds of Kindness, that’s definitely one of the themes, being lost.” He looks up hopefully. “So the thing that you’re running from is really the thing that it is.”
In its barbed, deadpan fashion, Kinds of Kindness works a treat. Shot at speed over seven weeks by Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos, the film spins three uncanny black comedies featuring the same cast of players (Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn). In the first story Plemons plays Robert, an oppressed office drone who’s coming apart at the seams. In the second he’s Daniel, a paranoid cop who suspects that his wife isn’t real. In the third he’s Andrew, a bespectacled boffin who wants to raise the dead. The hectic shoot had a freewheeling energy. Covid restrictions involved the crew doubling up as extras. Plemons had a day between segments to reset and switch roles. The process was so quick there was barely any time to get spooked.
One sequence, he says, particularly bothered him. “I’ll just say that it was a scene in the first story between Robert and Hong Chau’s character. A dark scene.” He grins crookedly. “I was very nervous about seeing that scene at the premiere. But it turns out that they cut it and I’m relieved that they did. I think it would have been a step too far.”
I would have assumed that by now that he was used to the darkness. The shadows are where he’s done his best work. On screen, Plemons embodies a midwestern normalcy that’s so wholesome and complete that it shades into strangeness. He was chilling as fresh-faced Todd Alquist, the deferential psychopath from Breaking Bad, profoundly disquieting as the lead-weight boyfriend in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, and purely scary as the rose-sunglasses-sporting militia man, squaring up to his real-life wife Kirsten Dunst’s character in Alex Garland’s Civil War. The trouble, he says, is that really dark characters can be hard to shake off.
“It’s not a conscious thing,” he begins and then pulls up short. “I was talking about being annoyed at the sound of my own voice. But I also find it tricky talking about acting. I truly love it so much and get so much out of it. But it’s difficult to talk about without veering into actor speak. But yeah, if you care about what you do – like your writing, your journalism – it tends to seep in whether you want it to or not. And I’m kind of obsessive. I don’t want to take the character home, but it does find its way in.” He shakes his head and reconsiders. “On good days it’s not a problem. You make the connection and get the release and whoosh, it’s gone. It’s the days that are struggles, that’s when you bring it home more. It’s because there’s something unresolved.”
Plemons was raised near Waco in Mart, Texas, which had a single stop light and 2,000 residents. As a kid he was fascinated by the TV miniseries Lonesome Dove, starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones as retired Texas Rangers, in part because it showed him a world he half knew. “My dad’s side of the family, they would all rope and ride horses. I grew up riding, so I was drawn to that world,” he says. “Also, my family would be extras. I’d go with my family to be an extra in different westerns that were always filming in our area. And so it felt like I was stepping into Lonesome Dove, your imagination come to life.”
The rejection. All the time, the rejection … I guess you have to love acting. Otherwise there’s no point
Plemons had been a high-school football star, and so Friday Night Lights provided his next natural fit: a finely textured sports drama, rooted in the soil of small-town Texas, even if his dopey freshman Landry didn’t quite fit the all-American mould. He was 18 when he joined the show and 21 when it ended. Peter Berg’s series was his equivalent of college, he says. “So there was a creative existential crisis that I felt afterwards, because Friday Night Lights was such a high. We were always on the verge of being cancelled. It was like we were these underdogs, having the time of our lives; ‘Gee, I can’t believe we’re still here.’ So I came back to the real world with a bump. I got disillusioned. Thought about doing something else.” He shrugs. “But what the hell else am I going to do?”
These days Plemons divides his time between Los Angeles and Austin. He and Dunst have two young sons. The couple met when they played husband and wife on season two of Fargo. They’ve since worked together on Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog as well as Civil War. Both started out as child actors. I’m wondering whether they would wish the same fate on their kids.
Plemons smiles. “I feel it would be hypocritical if I said no. But I’d never push them in that direction. And I’d be sure to let them know the flipsides.” Like what? “Ah,” he says. “I didn’t think you were going to ask me that. Well, all the things that people say are true. The rejection. All the time, the rejection. Although weirdly, I kind of got used to that pretty quickly. Because odds are you’re not going to get the part. But I guess you have to love it. Otherwise there’s no point.”
Plemons has made two films with Martin Scorsese (The Irishman; Killers of the Flower Moon). He has also made two films with Steven Spielberg (Bridge of Spies; The Post). These are arguably the two most significant American film-makers of the past half century. What does he think is the main difference between them?
“Oh,” he says, stumped again. “Well, it’s easier to start with their common quality, which is that they both still feel so lucky to be making movies. In terms of their differences, I don’t know. They’re both really collaborative. Marty is maybe a little more loose and fluid in terms of his approach to film-making.” He recalls Spielberg giving him direction on the set of The Post. “He said: ‘OK, come over here and do this, do that. I know it’s kind of cliched, but sometimes cliches are good.’ And he was so right – they are.” Cliches, Plemons adds, are really only old truths.
Because when you think about it, this is one of the very few jobs where a sense of play makes you better
Speaking of truisms, here’s another that applies. The secret to acting, Plemons feels, is to approach it in the way that he did as a child: like the horse-riding kid who loved Lonesome Dove, or the high-school athlete who played a version of himself on TV. It was the thrill of discovery that made Friday Nights Light so special. “And so that’s what I was chasing for years afterwards. That sense of fearlessness, of something pure. The level of play like a child. Because when you think about it, this is one of the very few jobs where a sense of play makes you better.” He thinks he’s finally rediscovered it now. It may even account for his recent run of fine form. A few days after Kinds of Kindness premieres, Plemons is named this year’s best actor at Cannes. He got lost in the woods and came out in one piece.
Ordinarily, Plemons would stick around for the festival’s closing ceremony. But the man is on a stopwatch; his diary is chock-a-block. Just lately he’s been working on a Netflix thriller, Zero Day, alongside Robert De Niro and Lizzy Caplan. He explains that this still has a couple of weeks left to film.
The shoot has been a blast; a little intimidating at times. “This is the third thing that I’ve done with De Niro,” he says, “so I’m getting comfortable working with him. But then occasionally I’ll look up and see Robert De Niro intrude and realise where I am and who I’m acting with. All of that.”
Try not to think about it, I tell him. Act naturally. Don’t look up. “Oh, absolutely,” says Plemons, but the man looks faintly stricken. “Absolutely, of course. If you stop to think, then you’re dead.”
Kinds of Kindness is in cinemas from 28 June.