How Jesse Plemons became Hollywood’s crown prince of dysfunctional masculinity

Cold-eyed malevolence doesn’t come any nastier than Jesse Plemons in Civil War. The Texas-born actor is only on screen in Alex Garland’s provocative thriller for a few minutes but leaves an indelible, utterly chilling impression. As a nameless, gun-toting vigilante in military fatigues and bright red sunglasses, he captures fully the terrifying mindset of a man who would shoot a stranger for being the wrong “kind of American” – who would think nothing of piling up corpses in a mass open grave.

“I run the gamut of terrible white guys,” Plemons joked to podcaster Marc Maron, explaining why he is so often typecast as psychotic misfits. “It’s the red hair and no eyebrows.” And typecast he is: Plemons’s characters are almost invariably people ill at ease in their own skin – the quietly spoken outsiders who often turn out to be killers or crooks. As his career has developed, it’s as if he has become Hollywood’s crown prince of dysfunctional masculinity. And he is in typically unsettling form in three separate roles in Yorgos Lanthimos’s bizarre new triptych picture, Kinds of Kindness.

Could this be the film that finally gets Plemons the mainstream recognition he deserves? It’s possible. He won the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival for his trifurcated role in Kinds of Kindness, an unexpected victory that may well have knock-on effects. But Plemons is a type arguably more associated with British cinema than with Hollywood – the chameleon-like character actor emerging as a star through the strength of his personality.

Barbara Broccoli won’t be knocking on his door to ask him to take over as 007 (although he’d make an excellent Bond villain). You’re not going to see him in the George Clooney or Brad Pitt roles. (Though early in his career, his resemblance to Matt Damon and involvement in the drug-dealing AMC series Breaking Bad did see him saddled with the nickname “Meth Damon.”) Nonetheless, big-name directors clamour to work with him. Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Jane Campion and Paul Thomas Anderson have all cast him in prominent parts. His name is seen as a badge of quality: since 2015, he has appeared in seven films with Best Picture nominations.

In Kinds of Kindness’s first episode, Plemons is all Mr Magoo-like meekness as an office worker called Robert, who does absolutely everything his boss Raymond (Willem Dafoe) tells him to. He’s a craven, pathetic salary man, seemingly without any free will of his own. In the second, he’s a paranoid policeman, convinced his marine biologist wife (Emma Stone) is an impostor. In the third, he’s one of the followers of a New Age sex guru played by Willem Dafoe. These oddballs look and behave very differently but Plemons tackles each of his roles with complete conviction, as real personalities with their own very human quirks.

There’s a dog-with-a-broken-paw-like quality to all of them: they put us on edge and evoke pity at the same time. What they have in common is their awkwardness in social situations, their earnestness and the extreme waywardness with which they behave. These are men who’ll invite the neighbours over for dinner and then get them to watch home-taped porn movies, or will ask their wives to self-harm to prove their devotion.

Those who’ve worked with Plemons talk about his quiet professionalism and describe him as an actor’s actor. “He is someone who is highly respected in the business. He is becoming more well known publicly – but that happens sometimes,” Ed Guiney, producer of Kinds of Kindness, tells me. “There are actors who are really revered in the business but not so well known outside it.”

Plemons, he suggests, has always had the respect of his peers even when he hasn’t been immediately recognised by a wider public. “He’s a fiercely intelligent actor and has huge range… on set, he’s incredibly focused, very pleasant to work with. It’s very collegiate, the way he works with other actors.”

Lanthimos, the Oscar-winning director of The Favourite and this year’s Poor Things, earmarked the Texan as a special talent several years ago. “That’s often how it works with Yorgos. He’ll spot people he really responds to and they will go in a database of names,” Guiney says.

Still only 36, Plemons already has a career stretching back three decades. He was a child actor, appearing in Coca-Cola and ice cream commercials. You can see him on YouTube in a 1996 ad for Blue Bell ice cream – a kid in denim smocks on an idyllic farm, getting his hair cut by his doe-eyed sisters who’ve put a pudding bowl on his head. He’s instantly recognisable and you can half-detect a hint of malice and mischief in his expression.

Many British fans caught their first sight of Plemons as the clammy, creepy young methamphetamine cook and former pest exterminator Todd Alquist in Breaking Bad, a politely spoken delinquent who thinks nothing of gunning down a kid in cold blood. “He’s fresh-faced, eager, innocuous but with something to hide,” read the notes that Plemons was given about Todd at his first audition – a description that could equally well apply to many of his other roles too.

It’s not all flat-affect psychopaths though: often, Plemons is content to be cast as the sidekick. One of his breakthrough roles was as the socially gauche college freshman Landry Clarke, best friend to the star quarterback, in American Football-based TV drama series Friday Night Lights (2006-2011). He registered so strongly that Landry, first envisaged as a minor character, became more and more prominent as the series progressed. Plemons was acting alongside teen heartthrobs like Taylor Kitsch and Zach Gilford but it’s telling he is the one who has gone on to have the richest and most varied career.

Another notable early part was the sceptical son of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s cult leader in The Master (2012), directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Many now see Plemons as Hoffman’s natural successor, an actor who brings pathos and depth to all his characters, however skimpily they may be written. Like Hoffman, he has the knack of making villains sympathetic and of showing the flaws and complexities within any heroes he plays.

Last year, Plemons starred as the upstanding but cunning 1920s FBI officer on the trail of Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. He was ostensibly one of the heroes, on the right side of the law for a change, but still seemed vaguely shifty. The first time we glimpse him, when he turns up with a smirk on his face halfway through the film, his cowboy hat on his head, saying he has been “sent down from Washington DC to see about these murders”, we know he’ll use any means at his disposal, fair or foul, to get his men.

Meanwhile, even when Plemons is playing family types, for example the docile rancher who marries a widow (his real-life partner Kirsten Dunst) in Jane Campion’s The Power of The Dog, he projects a vaguely apologetic air, as if he knows he’s not the alpha male. “It’s very interesting to watch him work because everything is just so small and underplayed,” Charlie Kaufman told The New York Times, after working with Plemons on his cerebral drama I’m Thinking of Ending Things.

Plemons is intensely serious about his craft but that seriousness will often pay comic dividends. He knows when to pause and to let viewers see the wheels turning in his mind. One of his most memorable performances was as Fargo season two’s Ed Blumqist, the small-town butcher’s assistant whose life takes a turn for the dark side after his wife Peggy (Dunst) accidentally kills a member of a fearsome crime syndicate. He’s an all-American everyman who finds it surprisingly easy to adjust to a life of subterfuge and criminality. At one stage, we see him blithely feeding a corpse through a meat grinder, Sweeney Todd-style, without any hint of a guilty conscience.

Plemons has talked of his admiration for rugged older actors such as Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones, who are similarly terse and undemonstrative on screen. Like them, he gives every movie in which he appears a lift, but remains guarded and low-profile off screen, wary about sounding pretentious. It was noteworthy that when he won Best Actor in Cannes, he wasn’t there in person to receive the award – he had already gone home. It didn’t seem even to cross his mind that he might pick up the award. The honour, though, is likely to mark a change in his career. It won’t be possible for him to carry on hiding in plain sight. Box office prospects for Kinds of Kindness remain uncertain given its wildly offbeat sensibility, but producers will surely have taken heed.

“For Jesse, the future is limitless. He’s that good,” Scorsese (who also worked with Plemons on The Irishman) recently told Texas Monthly. The challenge going forward is to excel as a leading man after more than two decades of playing supporting roles. Admirers don’t believe this will be any stretch.

“You just want to watch him. There are some actors you just want to watch. When they’re on, you’re engaged,” Guiney enthuses. “You’d watch Jesse do absolutely anything. He has huge range and certainly we’ll see him do more interesting and prominent things as time goes by. No matter what it was, you’d be transfixed by it.”

‘Kinds of Kindness’ is released on 28 June