Jesse Plemons is deliriously tired.
Draped across a sofa at Cannesâ ritzy Carlton Hotel with his legs outstretched, backlit by the late-afternoon Mediterranean sun, the actor apologizes for losing his train of thought on occasion, or tripping over the odd sentence.
I cannot blame him. It has been a long five years.
Of course, Plemons, 36, is likely just hitting the film-festival wall. Heâs fresh off the world premiere of his new film âKinds of Kindness,â the social rigors of the Croisette party circuit, a press conference and an hours-long junket.
But heâd have to be at least a little worn out going in from his meteoric rise: Since I last interviewed him for The Times in 2019 â for a piece headlined, in retrospect erroneously, âBeing one of TVâs best character actors suits Jesse Plemons just fineâ â heâs worked with acclaimed filmmakers Jane Campion, Martin Scorsese, Alex Garland and Yorgos Lanthimos, earned his first Oscar nomination and third Emmy nod and, a week after our conversation, walked away with Cannesâ best actor prize. Not that he planned it that way.
âItâs just a survival technique,â Plemons, who broke through as a teenager in NBCâs high-school football saga âFriday Night Lights,â says of his reluctance to plot out career moves. âIâve been doing it for so long that it almost doesnât benefit to look too far ahead. And thatâs kind of worked for me so far … Iâm constantly just looking at this next thing and following my gut [about] what is interesting and exciting to me.â
With âKinds of Kindness,â Lanthimosâ follow-up to last yearâs Oscar-winning âPoor Things,â that excitement came in the form of productive anxiety for Plemons, who at times found himself unmoored by the Greek filmmakerâs âunusualâ approach. Consider his rehearsals, which to hear Plemonsâ description are more like a destabilizing boot camp for actors than a run-through of the script.
âYouâre mainly playing these games,â Plemons recalls, âdoing these theater exercises that heâs picked up, developed, made up over the years, and my takeaway that first or second day was, âIs the whole point of this just to make me feel completely lost? Is that why weâre doing this? Because itâs working.ââ He disputes the characterization that Lanthimos is intentionally obtuse or withholding. âYou reach a point of âFâ it!â and it becomes so much fun and so liberating and so exhilarating and you start to realize, âThis is going to be a completely different way of working.â Youâre still doing the same thing, but the rules donât necessarily apply in the way they usually do.â
That freedom may explain why Lanthimos, reuniting here with âDogtoothâ and âThe Lobsterâ co-writer Efthimis Filippou, has been able to assemble a recurring company of players, including Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley and now Plemons. (The actor has already signed on for Lanthimosâ next feature, the thriller âBugonia,â a remake of the Korean film âSave the Green Planet.â)
âKinds of Kindness,â in theaters June 21, casts the above performers, along with Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie, Joe Alwyn and Hunter Schafer, in three separate stories, closer in tone to the misanthropic chill of âThe Killing of a Sacred Deerâ than the more buoyantly absurdist, if still offbeat, âPoor Thingsâ or âThe Favourite.â As a man who pays the price for standing up to his boss, another struggling to cope with his wifeâs return from a near-death experience and a third eager to curry favor with the leaders of a cult, Plemons emerges alongside Stone as the filmâs co-lead. Although âYorgos kept insisting it was a comedy,â as Plemons deadpans to me at one point, the subject matter roiling underneath the storiesâ anodyne log lines â forced sterilization, cannibalism, sexual assault â unsettled him as much as it will the viewer.
From left, Margaret Qualley, Jesse Plemons and Willem Dafoe in the movie âKinds of Kindness,â directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.
(Atsushi Nishijima / Searchlight Pictures)
âThe second one got under my skin pretty intensely and just left me feeling a little sick,â he says of the chapter titled âR.M.F. Is Flying,â which inverts the trope of the doting wife praying for her husbandâs survival and then takes it to twisted extremes. âNot just because of the body horror but â again, what I think is so amazing about [Lanthimosâ] work is it has the ability to really evoke very intense feelings and emotions that are hard to even sort through and articulate in your head. That was kind of the way I felt after reading the script, this sick to my stomach feeling. Not that I wasnât incredibly excited, but that one there was something really kind of insidious about that effect.â
One unexpected through line among Plemonsâ characters in the film is an attention to their physical appearance that at first concerned the actor, who lost weight before being approached for âKinds of Kindnessâ and worried Lanthimos wanted âthe bigger me.â In the first segment, âThe Death of R.M.F.,â Plemonsâ corporate functionary submits to a strict regimen established by his controlling employer (Dafoe), who quips, âSkinny men are the most ridiculous thing there isâ; in the third, âR.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,â heâs clad in a suit so baggy it seems designed to draw attention to the actorâs thinness. The transformation ended up working for the project, Plemons says, but he is already resigned to the speculation about how he achieved it.
âItâs really unfortunate that I decided to get healthy when everyone decided to take Ozempic,â he says. âIt doesnât matter, everyoneâs going to think I took Ozempic anyways. But what it was was getting older and â I hate even getting specific because then it turns into a whole thing, but there was a part that I did that in my mind I could not imagine him as the size that I was. Several people talked to me about intermittent fasting and I just gave it a shot and [was] surprised at how quickly it was effective. So I lost a little bit before I did that part and then felt like I was in the rhythm, I was feeling better, and something shifted in my head. I just sort of got a handle on it.â
That part generated perhaps the most talked-about single scene in American movies so far this year: Plemonsâ unnerving cameo as a mercurial soldier standing guard over a mass grave in Garlandâs âCivil War.â The actor, who had just spent months shooting the miniseries âLove & Death,â was ready for a break with his kids while wife Kirsten Dunst filmed the speculative photojournalism drama in Atlanta. Then she called and asked him if he would take on the role after another actor dropped out.
âThere was a part of me that was kind of like, âOh, God,â because that scene, even reading the script, is â I mean, the âgulpâ moment when your stomach drops and you feel the whole energy of the story shift.â
Given the crash circumstances in which he inherited the role, the intensity of Plemonsâ preparation is striking: In short order, he not only trimmed down to play the part, but also read Lt. Col. Dave Grossmanâs famed analyses of soldier behavior âOn Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Societyâ and its sequel âOn Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace.â He was inspired, he says, by Garlandâs depth of knowledge about real-life scenarios involving ârogue soldiers that have been out too long,â which in turn informed the selection of the characterâs much-remarked-upon red sunglasses.
â[Garland] also talked about the structure of âApocalypse Now,â which also deals with these types of soldiers and the idea that they all start off looking as traditional as you imagine and over time they start morphing and their appearances start changing and they start picking things up.â
Just as âBreaking Badâsâ Todd Alquist roused me to praise Plemonsâ outsize influence on any scene he appears in, his small but potent performances in âCivil Warâ and âKillers of the Flower Moonâ â as a federal agent looking into a series of suspicious Native American deaths â have led film fans on social media to anoint Plemons with the character actorâs highest praise: You know a movieâs gonna get good when this guy shows up.
âYou reach a point of âFâ it!â and it becomes so much fun and so liberating and so exhilarating and you start to realize, âThis is going to be a completely different way of working,ââ Plemons says of âKinds of Kindnessâ director Yorgos Lanthimosâ distinctive rehearsal process.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Plemonsâ friends have shown him the memes, which he good-naturedly laughs off, but he no more plans to receive such a reaction than he does his five-year career trajectory. Heâs in it, he says, for the variability of it all â different roles opposite different co-stars under different directors, who possess different âpersonalities and instincts and sensibilities.â (Among those heâd like to add to his resume: Sean Baker, recent Palme dâOr winner for âAnora,â âBirdâsâ Andrea Arnold and the Safdie brothers.)
A committed cinephile who studied Scorseseâs âThe King of Comedyâ before filming âKinds of Kindnessâ and spends a portion of our interview recommending Bill Douglasâ little-known trilogy of black-and-white shorts about a boy coming of age in a Scottish mining town, Plemonsâ desire to stretch himself creatively appears to be his only hard-and-fast rule in selecting projects.
âMicromanaging or too much judgment too early on is not helpful,â he says. âThere has to be a little period of discovery and finding it and experimenting, even if itâs just a take or two before we come in and try to make some definitive answer.â
As long as it provides this sort of running room, heâs game for whatever comes his way â even the âcharacter actorâ label thatâs stuck with him through a remarkable run of film and TV work.
âThose are always the actors that I admired and was always inspired by,â he says. âI wouldnât say I care too much about categorizing one way or the other, but I am someone who doesnât really care about the size of the part.â
This lack of ego explains why Plemons has been booked solid since the last time we talked. What filmmaker wouldnât want to work with an actor whoâll turn an uncredited cameo into a cultural moment, or throw himself headlong into a rehearsal process he doesnât even understand?
Just one request, from those of us eager to ensure he can keep making movies better for the next five years: Give the guy time for a nap.