Jesse Plemons he was flattered that Yorgos Lanthimos I would consider him to star Kinds of Kindness (“Tipos de Gentileza,” which will be released under that title in Latin America in the second half of August), but he wasn’t sure which version the director wanted. The protean 36-year-old character actor has sometimes put on weight for his roles. “Those first few weeks are glorious,” he says. “And then it gets depressing very quickly.”
Over the years, Plemons has lost weight for some roles and gained it back for others. It became easy to lose track, and directors continued to prefer him on his larger side. “I kept getting roles that size,” Plemons said in an interview last month at the Cannes Film Festival. “In the end it was: I have to get a handle on this. I have two small children and I want to be able to run around with them.”
“And I was nervous that (Yorgos) was only interested in the most big of me,” he adds. “I thought, I hope he’s still okay with the fact that I don’t look like the guy he thought I looked like.”
Who is, exactly, Jesse Plemons may seem elusive. Since his appearance in the series Friday Night Lights, Plemons has become one of the most versatile and talented actors in today’s cinema. He has proven to be extraordinarily malleable, appearing as everything from the lethal creep to Breaking Bad even the federal detective Killers of the Flower Moon (“The Killers of the Moon”). It slips into excitingly contemporary films like I’m Thinking of Ending Things (“I’m thinking of quitting”) and Civil War (“Civil War”) with the same smoothness with which he does with period pieces such as The Irishman (“The Irish”), The Power of the Dog (“The power of the dog”). He is less of a chameleon than a singular presence that can be marked as disturbing or sweet. Whether they are good or bad, Plemons’ characters tend to be sincerely themselvesa product, perhaps, of the sensitivity with which he approaches each role.
“I try not to make too many judgments too quickly and try to circle around the script and the role until I find some way,” Plemons says. “Something that resonates and makes sense to me and that pulls me along and doesn’t make it feel like work, but feels like I’m following a trail.” The darkly comic Kinds of Kindnesswhich opened this week in the United States, is a supreme and haunting display of his wide-ranging abilities. After its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last month, Plemons won the best actor prize, the biggest individual award of his career. It surely won’t be the last.
The film, produced by Searchlight Pictures, is made up of three stories written by Lanthimos and his frequent collaborator Efthimis Filippou. The triptych is not narratively connected, but each is performed with the same cast of actors, including Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley. And each story takes unpredictable, parable-like paths to explore themes of social conformity and control in relationships.
Plemons is central to the first two sections of the film. In the first, he plays a man named Robert who lives in total devotion to his boss (Dafoe), but their relationship breaks down when the boss asks Robert to drive his car against a stranger’s car. . Upon being released, Robert begins a desperate fall. In the second, Plemons plays a police officer named Daniel whose marine biologist wife (Stone) returns home after being stranded on a desert island for months. He believes she is not his real wife, but an impersonator, and tests her in increasingly sinister ways.
Those two characters, one a brooding paranoid, the other a humble puppy, encapsulate something about Jesse Plemons like actor. When he read the script, he says, “I thought it was brilliant, but I couldn’t tell you why.” “It was like: When is something like this going to show up again?” he wonders. “Probably never, so sign me up. Let’s see what happens”.
To Lanthimos, the filmmaker of Poor creatures and The favourite, likes a long and playful rehearsal period. But that didn’t help clear up Plemons’ initial confusion. “Throughout most of the rehearsal process, I felt completely lost and clueless, which in retrospect was like, ‘Yeah, I guess that’s part of it too.’“There is a certain submission and surrender to the process,” he says.
Lanthimos has been a longtime admirer of Plemons. “We always talk about Jesse. I think we thought about it for a couple of things, but it wasn’t available,” says the Greek director, speaking alongside Stone. “But I always had it in mind because I think that He is basically one of the greatest of his generation. There’s no doubt about it for me.” “He’s also a very nice and interesting person, which is always a plus when someone is that talented, but he’s also lovely to be around,” Stone adds.
Shortly after the premiere of Kinds of Kindnessthe filmmaker announced that his next project, titled Bugoniawill also star Plemons alongside Stone. “He’s part of the troop now,” he says, proudly.
Kind of Kindness adds to what has been a memorable year for Plemons. Earlier this year, the scene of him in Civil War of Alex Garlandin which he plays a jingoistic soldier who chillingly asks “What kind of American are you?”, was the most memorable (and oft-memed) moment in the film.
“I find people fascinating,” he says. “I guess I’m trying to operate from a place of curiosity and trying to figure out why. Because there is always some trace that leads back to the why. It is never a mystery, rarely, perhaps occasionally. But there is always something. That’s what I find interesting and then you finish it and it hits you, all that. That was definitely the case Civil War”.
Plemons, who grew up in Mart, Texas, has often been called upon to play menacing figures. But he has found ways to play smartly with that reputation and invest it. In Game nightPlemons played a foreboding neighbor whose deadpan interactions (“How can that be profitable for Frito Lay?”) were the comic highlight of the film.
But when trying to find out if Plemons sometimes resists playing darker, more demented characters, the question wasn’t over when he enthusiastically responded, “Yes!” “Like anyone, I think you don’t want to be redundant,” Plemons explains. “It’s not that dark characters are all the same. But that’s what to me is eternally interesting and a gift from an actor. Yes, I feel incredibly lucky to be in a place where I can be more selective. There is an element of ‘choose your own adventure’But there are times when, yeah, you just don’t want to walk in those shoes at that moment.”
“I have mixed feelings about it because there’s a part of me that really believes that there’s a point, and there’s something positive that comes from showing something like that as someone like that,” Plemons says of the character of Civil War“They do exist. That’s one of the great possibilities in cinema to hold up a mirror and, without being preachy, you’re forcing people to engage in a way where you’re appealing to them first from a human level in a way that a lot of other mediums might not be able to do.”
That kind of thoughtfulness is what has made him so sought after as an actor. He has noticed the change more in the last two years. In 2022, both he and Dunst were nominated for Oscars for their supporting performances in The power of the dog of Jane Campion.
“It’s about trying to hang in there and hone your time management skills,” Plemons says. “You realize you can do all the work you want, but if you don’t settle into the here and now and just act and go for a walk, then none of that matters.”
Source: AP
[Fotos: EFE/ The Walt Disney Company; Atsushi Nishijima/Searchlight Pictures vía AP; REUTERS/Sarah Meyssonnier; Europa Press]
