Jesse Plemons on Weight Loss, 'Civil War' and 'Kinds of Kindness'

Jesse Plemons is awfully tired.

Lying on a sofa at the luxurious Carlton Hotel in Cannes with his legs extended, backlit by the afternoon Mediterranean sun, the actor apologizes for occasionally losing his train of thought or stumbling over the odd phrase.

I can't blame him. It's been five long years.

Of course, Plemons, 36, is likely hitting the film festival wall. He is fresh from the world premiere of his new film “Kinds of Kindness,” the social rigors of the Croisette party circuit, a press conference and a several-hour tour.

But it would have to be at least a little Exhausted by his meteoric rise: Since I last interviewed him for The Times in 2019, for an article titled, in retrospect erroneously, “Being one of television's best character actors suits Jesse Plemons very well,” he has worked with acclaimed filmmakers Jane. Campion, Martin Scorsese, Alex Garland and Yorgos Lanthimos, he earned his first Oscar nomination and his third Emmy nomination and, a week after our conversation, he took home the best actor award at Cannes. Not that he planned it that way.

“It's just a survival technique,” Plemons, who starred as a teenager on the NBC football saga “Friday Night Lights,” says of his reluctance to plan career changes. “I've been doing it for so long that it's almost no use looking too far ahead. And that has worked for me so far… I constantly look at the next thing and follow my instincts. [about] which is interesting and exciting for me.”

With “Kinds of Kindness,” Lanthimos’ follow-up to last year’s Oscar-winning “Poor Things,” that excitement came in the form of productive anxiety for Plemons, who at times found himself unmoored by the Greek filmmaker’s “unusual” approach. . Consider his rehearsals, which, in Plemons's description, are more like a destabilizing training camp for actors than a script review.

“You're mainly playing these games,” Plemons recalls, “doing these theatrical exercises that you've learned and developed and invented over the years, and my conclusion that first day or two was, 'Is the point of this just? Make me feel completely lost? Is that why we're doing this? 'Cause it's working.'” He questions the characterization of Lanthimos being intentionally obtuse or secretive. “You get to a point of 'Fuck it!' And it becomes so fun, so freeing, and so stimulating that you start to realize that 'this is going to be a completely different way of working.' You're still doing the same thing, but the rules don't necessarily apply like they usually do.”

That freedom may explain why Lanthimos, reuniting here with “Dogtooth” and “The Lobster” co-writer Efthimis Filippou, has been able to assemble a returning company of actors, including Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley and now Plemons. (The actor has already signed on for Lanthimos' next feature, the thriller “Bugonia,” a remake of the Korean film “Save the Green Planet.”)

“Kinds of Kindness,” which will be released in theaters on June 21, features the aforementioned artists, along with Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie, Joe Alwyn and Hunter Schafer, in three separate stories, with a tone closer to the cold misanthrope from “The Killing of a Sacred Deer.” ” than the more joyfully absurd, although still unconventional, “Pobres” or “The Favorite.” As one man paying the price of standing up to his boss, another struggling to cope with his wife's return from a near-death experience, and a third eager to curry favor with cult leaders, Plemons emerges alongside Stone as the film's sidekick. -lead. Although “Yorgos kept insisting that it was a comedy,” as Plemons deadpans to me at one point, the theme stirring beneath the anodyne lines of the stories' record (forced sterilization, cannibalism, sexual assault) disturbed him as much as it did. will do with the viewer.

“The second one affected me quite a bit and left me a little sick,” he says of the chapter titled “RMF Is Flying,” which inverts the trope of the doting wife praying for her husband's survival and then taking it to twisted extremes. “Not just because of the body horror, but also, again, what I think is so surprising about [Lanthimos’] The work is that it has the ability to evoke very intense feelings and emotions that are difficult to even classify and articulate in your head. That's how I felt after reading the script, that sick stomach feeling. “Not that I wasn't incredibly excited, but there was something really insidious about that effect.”

An unexpected throughline between Plemons' characters in the film is the attention to their physical appearance that initially worried the actor, who lost weight before he was approached for “Kinds of Kindness” and worried that Lanthimos would want “a more self.” big”. In the first segment, “The Death of RMF,” Plemons’ corporate officer is subjected to a strict regimen established by his controlling employer (Dafoe), who jokes, “Skinny men are the most ridiculous thing ever”; in the third, “RMF Eats a Sandwich,” he is dressed in a suit so baggy that it seems designed to draw attention to the actor's thinness. The transformation ended up working for the project, Plemons says, but he has already resigned himself to speculation about how he achieved it.

“It's really unfortunate that I decided to recover when everyone decided to take Ozempic,” he says. “It doesn't matter, everyone is going to think I took Ozempic anyway. But what it was was getting older and… I hate to even be specific because then it becomes a whole thing, but there was a part that I did where in my mind I couldn't imagine him at the size that I was. Several people told me about intermittent fasting and I just tried it and [was] I was surprised how quickly it was effective. So I lost a little bit before doing that part and then I felt like I was in the rhythm, I felt better and something changed in my head. I just understood it.”

That part spawned perhaps the most talked-about scene in American movies so far this year: Plemons' disturbing cameo as a mercurial soldier standing guard over a mass grave. in Garland's “Civil War.” The actor, who had just spent months filming the miniseries “Love & Death,” was ready for a break with his children while his wife Kirsten Dunst filmed the speculative photojournalism drama in Atlanta. Then she called him and asked if he would take the role after another actor dropped out.

“There was a part of me that was like, 'Oh, God,' because that scene, even reading the script, is… I mean, the 'gulp' moment where your stomach drops and you feel all the energy. of the movie. change of history.”

Given the circumstances of the accident under which he inherited the role, the intensity of Plemons' preparation is surprising: within a short time, he not only narrowed down to play the role, but also read Lt. Col. Dave Grossman's famous analyzes of the behavior of soldiers “On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society” and its sequel “On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and Peace.” He was inspired, he says, by Garland's deep knowledge of real-life scenarios involving “rebel soldiers who've been gone too long,” which in turn influenced the selection of the character's much-discussed red sunglasses. .

“[Garland] I also talked about the structure of 'Apocalypse Now', which is also about these types of soldiers and the idea that they all start out looking as traditional as you imagine and over time they start to transform and their appearances start to change and they start picking up things. . .”

Just as Todd Alquist of “Breaking Bad” prompted me to praise Plemons' enormous influence on any scene he appears in, his small but potent performances in “Civil War” and “Killers of the Flower Moon,” as a federal agent who investigate a series. of suspicious Native American deaths, have led film fans on social media to anoint Plemons with the character actor's highest praise: You know a movie is going to get good when this guy shows up.

“You get to a point of 'Fuck it!' and it becomes very fun and freeing and stimulating and you start to realize, 'This is going to be a completely different way of working,'” Plemons says of “Kinds of Kindness” director Yorgos Lanthimos' distinctive rehearsal process.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Plemons' friends have shown him the memes, which he laughs good-naturedly at, but he doesn't plan on receiving such a reaction beyond his five-year career trajectory. He's in it, he says, because of the variability of it all: different roles opposite different co-stars under different directors, who possess different “personalities, instincts and sensibilities.” (Among those she would like to add to his resume: Sean Baker, recent Palme d'Or winner for “Anora,” Andrea Arnold of “Bird,” and the Safdie brothers.)

A committed cinephile who studied Scorsese's “The King of Comedy” before filming “Kinds of Kindness” and who dedicates a part of our interview to recommending Bill Douglas' little-known trilogy of black and white shorts about a boy who reaches coming of age in a Scottish country. mining town, Plemons' desire to push himself creatively seems to be his only hard and fast rule when selecting projects.

“Micromanaging or overjudging too early doesn't help,” he says. “There has to be a little period of discovery, searching and experimentation, even if it's just one or two takes before we go in and try to come up with a definitive answer.”

As long as you give him this kind of room to run, he's up for anything that comes his way, even the “character actor” label that followed him through a notable string of film and television work.

“Those are always the actors that I admired and that always inspired me,” he says. “I wouldn't say I care much about categorizing one way or another, but I'm someone who doesn't really care about the size of the piece.”

This lack of ego explains why Plemons has been completely reserved since we last spoke. What filmmaker wouldn't want to work with an actor who turns an uncredited cameo into a cultural moment or dives headlong into a rehearsal process he doesn't even understand?

Just one request, from those of us eager to make sure he can keep making better movies for the next five years: Give the kid some time to take a nap.