Starting his career at age 10, Jesse Plemons rose to prominence at 18 in the NBC TV drama “Friday Night Lights.”
Plemons has had the acting bug for as long as he can remember.
His roles in “Breaking Bad” and, most recently, Scorsese’s epic Western, Killers of the Flower Moon are defined by undercurrent of calm that draws viewers in, giving them a sense of confidence but also unease.
This method was manifest in his role in Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, for which he earned his first Oscar nomination (in the supporting league).
My Oscar Book:
It is a throughline with all his characters, though, in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Plemons said this wasn’t intentional.
Survival Technique: Gut Feeling
Lanthimos’ darkly comedic triptych Kinds of Kindness earned Plemons the Best Actor prize at the 2024 Cannes Film Fest in May.
Lanthimos Process:
“You’re mainly playing these games, doing these theater exercises that he’s picked up, developed, made up over the years, and my takeaway that first or second day was, ‘Is the whole point of this just to make me feel completely lost? Is that why we’re doing this? Because it’s working.'”
Even though he may not have understood what Lanthimos was trying to achieve, Plemons trusted the writer-director to take him where he needed to go, and that the end product would have an effect, no matter what.
