Nice guy at home, nasty on screen: Why Jesse Plemons loves his latest maniac

Before we start talking about his latest film, Bugonia, Jesse Plemons and I spend a minute or so picking apart small tensions in the Antipodes. He has spotted my accent and is trying, without actually asking, to work out which side of the Tasman I come from. That settled, I ask how long it’s been since he was in New Zealand to shoot Jane Campion’s 2021 film The Power of the Dog.

“I have no concept of how long, really. Five years, four years, a long time ago,” he says in that slowed-down drawl straight outta Texas: no mistaking where he grew up.

Plemons, 37, has been in this business for something like 35 years. Before his Oscar-nominated performance in The Power of the Dog, in which he played browbeaten brother to Benedict Cumberbatch’s surly farmer, he was a Teamsters heavy in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and a white supremacist in Breaking Bad. After The Power of the Dog, he was a techbro torturer in Black Mirror, a cameo killer in Alex Garland’s Civil War and a dweeb running over his boss’s enemies in Kinds of Kindness, Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ trio of tales dealing with dominance and obedience.

For an actor known in real life for his good nature, Plemons has played a lot of nasties.

Most child actors have parents already in show business or who want to be. Plemons’ father was a firefighter in a small town 30 kilometres out of Waco; his mother taught in special needs education. Nevertheless, he got his first break when he was two. “It was kind of a fluke,” he says, looking slightly abashed by this accident of fortune. “There was an open call for a Coca-Cola commercial in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and we were just passing by. My mom took me in and I ended up getting it.

“That kind of opened the door. Obviously, at 2½ years old, that’s not something I’m begging my parents to do, but what it did was that after that, we really treated it as a fun family outing where we would go and be extras in whatever was filming in the area. And I really responded to it immediately, the whole make-believe imaginary land of it.”

Young Jesse loved westerns on television. A lot of westerns were filmed around where they lived, he says; he grew up around rodeos and he looked the part. His parents allowed him to work through school as long as he kept up good grades. He did. Gradually, a solid career as a support actor became a distinguished one, marked by good choices. He was nominated for an Emmy for his role as Ed in the TV version of Fargo, where he met his wife, Kirsten Dunst, then again for his role in Black Mirror. (A third Emmy nomination, for Love & Death, came in 2023.)

He was still comfortably below stardom’s Plimsoll line, however, when The Power of the Dog’s Oscar successes put him in the spotlight. Then he won the best actor prize in Cannes for the three characters he played in Kinds of Kindness, which immediately ratcheted up his stardom to the point where he was on magazine covers. There is a strong sense, right here in this room, that he wasn’t looking for this kind of attention. Certainly, nobody makes weird films with Lanthimos because they’re trying to be famous. For both him and Emma Stone – who won an Oscar for Poor Things – things certainly panned out that way.

Bugonia’s Teddy is Plemons’ second venture into the Lanthimos world. It is certainly the most bizarre of his roles so far. Teddy is a lonely beekeeper hooked on internet conspiracy theories in the sci-fi revenge fantasy. He leads a cult of one, having co-opted his autistic cousin Dan (Aidan Delbis, who lives with autism in real life and is quite marvellous) into his frenzied plan to kidnap Michelle (Emma Stone), the chillingly high-achieving chief executive of Auxolith, a big pharma company.

Teddy is convinced Auxolith is poisoning bees – not just his own bees, but the world’s colonies. It isn’t hard to believe, given that this pharma behemoth has poisoned his mother, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone), who has been comatose for years after being dosed with an experimental opioid withdrawal drug. Sandy was a guinea pig; for Auxolith, she was just human detritus.

At least this all makes sense. Unfortunately, Teddy also believes that Michelle, whose razor-edged brio comes across as a caricature of lean-in feminism, is actually an alien. Not only that, but that she is one of many aliens trying to take over the planet. He resolves to kidnap, imprison and possibly torture her. If the aliens want her back, they will have to agree to leave Earth during the next lunar eclipse.

The story is taken from Korean filmmaker Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 sci-fi Save the Green Planet!, updated with truther rhetoric and the influence of the internet. Scriptwriter Will Tracy, who worked on Succession and co-wrote the 2022 film The Menu, also ramps up its anger at the rich and powerful. Everyone here is guilty of something.

Plemons did his own deep dive into the web, of course. “Once you start looking, it just keeps feeding it to you, so that was easy,” he says. “There’s no shortage of any type of conspiracy you want to research. A lot of alien conspiracy theories, a lot of MAGA. At a certain point, Teddy kind of lays out his history of different ideologies, different factions, people that he has affiliated himself with and how silly that was. Now, he’s found the truth!” He doesn’t mock it. “There’s comfort in that, the thought that you have discovered the source of all of your pain and feelings of being overlooked and disenfranchised and used. It probably feels good!”

The source he found most useful, however, was journalist Naomi Klein’s memoir Doppelganger, which uses her experience of being regularly confused with another formerly progressive journalist – another Naomi – who had since embraced the far right as a springboard to discuss how anyone could be persuaded of beliefs they would once have found ridiculous. “It was the perfect book for me to read, early on,” he says.

“But the other piece of this is one of my best friends is a very big alien enthusiast. We had many long, interesting conversations. You know, you talk to people about their interests and they can just talk all day. I recently got into photography and I feel the same way. I could talk about that ad nauseam.” Somewhat different, surely? “It is, but it’s not,” says Plemons. “I kind of feel it holds a similar place.”

Elsewhere, Plemons has also mentioned a personal spiritual quest, drawing on different philosophies, but so vaguely that it is clear that he is keeping it personal. His family life also feels private, although he talks about that with evident pleasure. He and Dunst have sons aged four and seven who, he says, are not especially interested in what their parents do.

“It’s like a strange reality that they sometimes remember or see,” he says. “When Kirsten and I go to some awards shows, usually our moms will have a gathering and watch on TV, and so they’ll see us then. And they’ve seen a couple of age-appropriate movies Kirsten and I have been in.” Dunst has Jumanji and her Spiderman series, which wins points with their younger son; there isn’t too much on Plemons’ CV they can share. “But I don’t think they care too much. They’re busy doing their little boy stuff.”

He and Dunst worked together on The Power of the Dog and – very briefly – on Civil War, but generally take turns. Earlier this year, she shot Swedish director Ruben Ostlund’s The Entertainment System is Down, a film set entirely on a long-haul flight. “Oh man! That was just obviously an insanely brilliant script,” Plemons enthuses. “They spent five or six months shooting in the interior of an airplane, so pretty claustrophobic but again, that yin-yang of crazy-making is the exact thing you’re looking for as an actor.”

They always read each other’s scripts. “So we have some kind of idea what the other one might be thinking about or going through,” says Plemons. “It is tough because one of us is home with the kids so you know, we have very different days. It does help to read all the scripts and know what’s going on. And we both really respect each other’s opinions, so we inevitably end up talking out ideas, that sort of thing. When we met on Fargo, for whatever reason, we naturally had this way of working together. I know I felt like she made me better immediately. She’s my partner in crime; I couldn’t do it without her, I love her so much.”

He thinks Bugonia was the hardest job he’s ever done, but also one of the most gratifying. He was scared when he read the script and, he says now, he was right to be. Having done Kinds of Kindness, he knew that the Lanthimos madhouse was not a comfortable place to be. “It’s really difficult and challenging, but also like you’re on a wild rollercoaster. It’s really exhilarating when you can give into it, let go your idea of a scene and just submit to the ride of every take.”

The most fulfilling acting jobs, he says, involve coming to terms with people who are not like you. “You’re getting to explore the full range of human experience, trying to sympathise with it or at least not judge it. That’s in the job description, you know. Every part I play, I feel I learn something that I could have only learnt that way.” It isn’t always easy to suspend judgment; his evil militiaman in Civil War was particularly repellent. “I was just ‘Shoot him!’ once I was done with him,” says Plemons. “I’ve never needed a long shower at the end of the day like I did after shooting that scene.”

But he loved Teddy. His violence, vicious as it was, felt to him like the fury of a child. “Children are magical creatures. Everything’s just so raw with them. He’s kind of brilliant, and he’s kind of dumb, and also kind of childlike; he’s easily duped.”

In his own warped way, Teddy just wants to help. “I really think that, at the heart of it, he really wants to be a hero, right the wrongs of the past, help his cousin and save his mom. Like a kid wanting to be a superhero, you know.”

And while he may be a maniac, he’s not always wrong: his mother really was exploited as a guinea pig and left for dead. “That’s one of the things Naomi Klein talks about, that there’s a shred of truth in most conspiracies – and that the feeling people like Teddy are experiencing, that there are forces that are working against you and don’t care about you, is not wrong. It’s just much harder to see the reality of the conspiracy that’s right before your eyes because it’s so overwhelming.”

And who doesn’t want to save the world, whether it’s from climate change, World War III or an invasion of aliens? “I can relate to that feeling, feeling you have a lot inside of you and you have something to offer, but you look around at how f---ed the world is and how impossible it seems to effect some kind of change,” says Plemons. “And you feel like, ‘Where do I put this feeling?’” Into a Yorgos Lanthimos film, obviously. It may not have any answers, but it turns the search for them into one hell of a crazy, intense and often hilarious ride.

Bugonia opens in cinemas on October 30.

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