Jesse Plemons: âGaining weight messed me up a bitâ
The actor who terrified us in â??Breaking Badâ?? and the recent â??Civil Warâ?? talks to Louis Chilton about working with Robert De Niro in Netflixâ??s â??Zero Dayâ??, flubbing his audition for â??Star Warsâ??, and child acting
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Imagine, if you will â what historians might call counterfactual thinking â a world in which Jesse Plemons, the actor who played Breaking Badâs most chilling character, was one of the faces of the Star Wars sequel trilogy. If certain reports were to be believed, this very nearly happened. But maybe they werenât to be believed. âOh God,â Plemons tells me, grimacing. âI went in, gave a terrible audition. I had no idea what I was doing... it was just these scenes without any context. [Director] JJ Abrams was really nice, but I was spiralling.â
In hindsight, itâs probably a good thing that Plemons â then fierce with the heat of his Breaking Bad role as the violent, empathy-free pest-exterminator turned meth cook Todd â never got too close to that galaxy far, far away. Thereâs something about Plemons thatâs too credible for something as extraterrestrial as Star Wars â a rare and offbeat verisimilitude. Put him in a Star Wars movie, and you might have people running out of the cinema mid-scene just to check for themselves that they are safe; that a Death Star is not, in fact, hovering menacingly above the horizon.
And besides, the run of projects that followed that rejection, from prestige TV hits (Fargo) and intimate dramas (Other People) to substantial Oscar-winners (The Power of the Dog; Judas and the Black Messiah) established him as one of the most sought-after character actors around. Just ask Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, or Yorgos Lanthimos.
I am sitting with Plemons on a grey February afternoon, in a small hotel room overlooking the streets of central London. The 36-year-old is dressed sharply â herringbone coat, jean shirt and boots, his hair worn long and swept back. Early in his career, Plemons would often be likened to a young Matt Damon, but the truth is thereâs no mistaking him for anyone else. He has one of those inimitable larger-than-life faces: narrow, mercurial eyes, and a wide, taut hammock of a grin.
Heâs looking lean, too. There has, in fact, been a marked change to his body over the past few years. âIt is one of the many strange things about this job,â he says, slowly.
âI first gained weight for Black Mass,â he explains â the 2015 crime film in which Plemons played real-life mafioso Kevin Weeks opposite Johnny Deppâs Whitey Bulger. âI never imagined getting to play a part like that. [Gaining weight] was a decision I made at that age, given that opportunity for that director â and I was playing a real person. I donât regret it. But it was very easy to put the weight on, and much more difficult taking it off. I donât know if itâs something I would do again â because it did mess me up a bit.â
He pauses, then goes on. âI felt like that decision I made sort of dictated the types of parts I was being asked to play, and then started to seep into my own identity... which wasnât necessarily who I was before that.â
It took getting cast in Civil War, Alex Garlandâs 2024 dystopian thriller, for Plemons to lose weight, through fasting and lifestyle changes. (He appears in just one sequence, as a soldier bent on killing strangers according to how âAmericanâ he perceives them to be â being the wrong âkind of Americanâ brings execution.) âBeing asked to play that character and being unable to see him at my current weight... that kind of snapped me out of it,â he says. âAs well as having young kids. And I just got a handle on it again. Having lost the weight, aside from feeling better, it does feel like Iâve opened another door to potential parts I can play.â
Plemonsâs threatening bit part was the most talked-about sequence in Civil War. Garlandâs provocative story follows roaming war journalists in an imagined near-future: the US is in the death rattle of a fascist presidentâs third term, with the ideologically divided nation having erupted into violent conflict. The parallels with the contemporary US are many and glaring. Itâs a similar state of affairs in Zero Day, a six-part thriller just released on Netflix, which touches on a range of fraught, ripped-from-the-headlines ideas: a US president with cognitive impairment; the surveillance state; warped conspiracist content-mongers; cyberterrorism.
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Try for freeâWith a lot of the projects Iâve been working on of late, the parallels [with reality] are kind of undeniable,â Plemons says. âBut for actors, thereâs always this hyperfocus on the characters, the relationships â the human aspects of it. If other people draw those conclusions, great.â
A slippery customer: Jesse Plemons in âZero Dayâ (Netflix )Plemons has a habit of stroking his chin when in thought, flashing the faded tattoo on the inside of his finger. It reads âTVZâ â meaning Townes Van Zandt, the brilliant and troubled singer-songwriter (and fellow Texan) who died back in 1997. Van Zandt sang about misfits, misanthropes, people in love â itâs easy to guess why his music resonated with Plemons, who has made a career out of playing unconventional men.
âMost people arenât one thing,â he says, pensively. âThey have a lot more going on beneath the surface than maybe we would like to think â good and bad. When Iâm reading a script, Iâm interested in someone that doesnât immediately reveal themselves or fit into some category. I think it comes from a place of wanting to understand... and theyâre also just more fun.â
It was the chance to play a character like this that prompted Plemons to sign up to Zero Day. Robert De Niro fronts the series as George Mullen, a former president who heads up a controversial, civil-liberty-threatening task force in the wake of a massive cyberattack. Plemons is Roger, his former aide, now a political fixer â with more than a few secrets. âI really loved Roger, how slippery he is,â Plemons says. âThereâs an unpredictable quality to him.â
I donât think my grandma has seen âKinds of Kindnessâ, and I hope that she never does
Jesse Plemons
Another factor in his decision to sign on to the series â aside from the âcaptivatingâ script â was the chance to work with creator Lesli Linka Glatter again. (He previously worked with her on the 2023 miniseries Love & Death âand just loved the experienceâ.) Plemons has worked with De Niro before, too â on the Scorsese crime epics The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon. âItâs one of those things I never even thought to dream about,â Plemons says. âYou donât even allow that thought... heâs one of the best actors of all time. Those few scenes I had with him in The Irishman, I was doing just everything I could to not freak out.â With Zero Day, at least, he has âgotten a little more comfortable with the reality of working with himâ.
Whatâs oddly striking about Zero Day is just how normal Plemonsâs character seems, coming off a year that gave us Civil War and Kinds of Kindness. This latter film, a tar-black triptych from The Lobster director Lanthimos, saw Plemons (like most other cast members) take on three different roles. In the first story, he plays a man whose entire life is controlled by his boss (Willem Dafoe), down to the smallest detail. In the second, he is a husband who becomes convinced that his wife (Emma Stone) has been replaced by a near-identical replica, so he convinces her to mutilate herself. In the third, he portrays a member of a sex cult hunting for a messiah figure with supernatural powers.
Even if you havenât seen the film, you can probably surmise from the above that this was not a crowd-pleaser. (Except with festival jury crowds, that is: Kinds of Kindness won Plemons the Cannes Film Festival award for Best Actor.) For Lanthimos, it was a return to the sort of dark, off-putting surrealism that defined his early films, after heâd become an unlikely awards darling with the fractionally more accessible The Favourite and Poor Things.
âItâs not a movie for everyone,â says Plemons, âwhich is really exciting â that there are people willing to take these risks. I donât think my grandma has seen it, and I hope that she never does,â he adds, letting out a big, sinewy chuckle.
Threeâs company: Margaret Qualley, Jesse Plemons and Willem Dafoe in âKinds of Kindnessâ ( Searchlight Pictures)Itâs hard to place just why Plemons has such a knack for playing creeps and oddballs. It helps, for one thing, that his face is constitutionally hard to read. Plemons seems to have a whole catalogue of microscopically different squints at his disposal, each conveying something completely new (cunning; suspicion; distress; vacuousness; anger). And yet, off camera, this opacity does not read as frightening in the slightest.
While Kinds of Kindness feels unfettered in its breaking of taboo, Plemons has mentioned one scene being a âstep too farâ. The sequence, involving Plemonsâs first character and his wife, played by Hong Chau, was cut during the edit. What was so bad about it, I ask? âI donât even want to say,â he says, an unaffected graveness in his voice. âA marital â â He stops himself. âIt was just one of those scenes that make you feel sick.â
Whatâs great about Lanthimosâs work, he says, is that âall of the surrealism and absurdism and horror â sometimes that feels more like life than the super-realistic things. Because life is very strange and disorienting and dizzying at times.â Itâs no surprise that the two of them, plus Stone, are set to collaborate again on the forthcoming Bugonia. (The official logline says that the film âfollows two conspiracy-obsessed young men who kidnap the high-powered CEO of a major company, convinced that she is an alien intent on destroying planet Earthâ.)
Plemons has, by this point, been knocking around the industry for three decades. The son of a firefighter father and a special educational trainer mother, Plemons started out as a child actor â a backstory he has in common with his wife, Kirsten Dunst. The pair got to know each other while playing a married couple in Fargoâs brilliant second season â he a loyal and long-suffering butcher, she a stifled homemaker, dippy and chaos-causing â but didnât get romantically involved until a while after. (Since coupling up, they have appeared in The Power of the Dog and Civil War together, both earning Oscar nominations for the former, and now have two children.)
Dunst and Plemons at the Golden Globes in January (Getty )Being a child actor, says Plemons, âexposed me at such an early age to so many different types of people. Had I not gotten into it so young, I still feel like I would have been drawn to it. But thanks to my parents making a split decision â taking me to this commercial audition â I learnt that it was possible. That it was in the realm of possibilities to do this for a living.â
Where Dunst found early stardom in films such as Little Women and Jumanji, Plemons was more of a jobbing child actor; he got his breakthrough at 18, when he was cast in the American high-school football drama Friday Night Lights as Landry Clarke, a sportsphobic outsider in a football-obsessed college town. That series, which ran for five seasons, was critically adored, but relatively little-seen. Breaking Bad was a different story: when Plemons signed on to the crystal meth saga, it was in the throes of becoming a full-blown pop-cultural phenomenon.
His character, Todd, is among the nastiest pieces of work in Plemonsâs repertoire, a ruthlessly practical lackey with ties to the white nationalist underground. Plemons has previously suggested that the character could be âon the spectrumâ. âI donât know if I still agree with that,â he says. âI guess in some ways itâs helpful, in other ways itâs limiting, to classify a character like that. Itâs obvious that thereâs something in him that prevents him from understanding the gravity of his actions.â
Mething around: Aaron Paul, Jesse Plemons and Bryan Cranston in âBreaking Badâ (AMC )Itâs a testament to Plemonsâs range that heâs been able to wriggle free from Breaking Bad; Todd is the kind of memorably evil character that can cling to an actor like a tick. âBreaking Bad was just so wrapped up in the zeitgeist when it was coming out,â Plemons says. âEven by the time that I entered into it, it had such a devoted fanbase. I feel like I still havenât fully lived that down... Some people will probably still look at me â and refer to me â as Todd, or any of the other nicknames that the character was called.â
He laughs, knowingly. (For years, Plemons was dogged with the sobriquet âMeth Damonâ â a reference to both Breaking Badâs drug of choice and the aforementioned movie-star resemblance.) âIt is a strange thing to meet the people who only know you as a part. Theyâre looking at you as this different person, who has done some awful things.â
Our time is nearly up, and I am thinking, again, about Star Wars. Within Plemonsâs generation, itâs commonplace for any young actor with a jot of promise to be shoehorned into the world of franchise blockbusters; part of the reason that Plemonsâs body of work has been so strong is that heâs largely avoided forays into the mainstream popcorn-movie sphere.
When I ask if this was a deliberate strategy on his part, Plemons seems to bristle, ever so slightly. âWell, I did a movie called Jungle Cruise; I did a movie called Battleship,â he says, with a droll, inscrutable smile. âI had a great time in both of those movies. But... is it a conscious decision? Most of my decisions donât feel all that conscious. Most of them just feel like, âAh, s***, Iâve got to do this.ââ
Wherever that feeling is coming from â his conscious, his unconscious, his gut, or some freak clairvoyance â itâs too late to stop listening now.
âZero Dayâ is streaming now on Netflix
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Both SBS’s “Buried Hearts” and MBC’s “Undercover High School” saw their viewership ratings rise for their second episodes!
On February 22, Park Hyung Sik’s new drama “Buried Hearts” enjoyed a significant increase in viewership. According to Nielsen Korea, the second episode of the show scored an average nationwide rating of 8.1 percent, marking an impressive 2 percent jump from its premiere the night prior—and making it the most-watched miniseries of the entire week.
Despite facing stiff competition from “Buried Hearts,” Seo Kang Jun’s new drama “Undercover High School”—which airs in the same time slot—also rose to an average nationwide rating of 6.6 percent for its own second episode.
“Undercover High School” was also the most-watched drama of Saturday among the key demographic of viewers ages 20 to 49, with whom it earned an average rating of 2.8 percent.
tvN’s “When the Stars Gossip”—which has just one episode left in its run—fell to an all-time low of 1.783 percent ahead of its series finale, while Channel A’s new drama “The Witch” scored an average nationwide rating of 1.7 percent for its third episode.
Finally, KBS 2TV’s “For Eagle Brothers” remained the most-watched program of Saturday with an average nationwide rating of 16.3 percent.
Check out the first two episodes of “Undercover High School” with subtitles on Viki below:
[viki-watchnow url=https://www.viki.com/tv/40985c-undercover-high-school]
Or start watching “The Witch” here:
[viki-watchnow url=https://www.viki.com/tv/40442c-the-witch]
And “For Eagle Brothers” below!
[viki-watchnow url=https://www.viki.com/tv/40963c-for-eagle-brothers]
Source (1) (2) (3)
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 (2) (3) %23maine) |
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Hunter Schafer made a return to the spotlight at the 2025 Independent Spirit Awards, her first appearance since calling out Trump over her passport listing her as 'male'.
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Severance season 2 ep. 6's villain twist explained
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Voletta Wallace, the mother of the late rapper Notorious B.I.G., died Friday, February 21
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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Jeremy Ebobisse scored in the 78th minute of his first match with his new club, and Los Angeles FC remained perfect in eight Major League Soccer season openers with a 1-0 victory…
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 — Jeremy Ebobisse scored in the 78th minute of his first match with his new club, and Los Angeles FC remained perfect in eight Major League Soccer season openers with a 1-0 victory… %23maine){kind=logo} |
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President Donald Trump has chosen Dan Caine to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
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Golden State Warriors are back with a new edge. Coach Steve Kerr shares how it all came together and its impact on the team.
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Vladimir Guerrero Jr. loves Canada and especially the Jays, but for his upcoming free agency — he is next winter’s clear No. 1 guy — he suggests he will consider any of the 30 teams.
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Democratic Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers faced accusations after he introduced a bill in which the word
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We can't cope.
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BLACKPINK’s Rosé is soaring to unprecedented heights on U.S. radio!
For the week ending on February 22, Rosé and Bruno Mars’ smash hit “APT.” remained No. 1 for the fourth week in a row on Billboard’s Pop Airplay chart, which measures weekly plays on mainstream Top 40 radio stations across the United States. Notably, Rosé is the first K-pop artist ever to top the chart.
“APT.” also rose to a new peak of No. 4 in its 13th week on Billboard’s Radio Songs chart, which measures U.S. radio plays across all musical genres (not just Top 40 pop).
Even including groups and male acts, Rosé is now the first K-pop artist ever to reach the top 4 of the Radio Songs chart.
Additionally, “APT.” stayed strong at No. 2 in its 17th week on Billboard’s Global Excl. U.S. chart, No. 3 on the Global 200, No. 7 on the Hot 100, No. 11 on the Digital Song Sales chart, and No. 12 on the Streaming Songs chart.
Meanwhile, Rosé’s solo album “rosie” remained stable at No. 31 in its 10th week on the Billboard 200, extending its own record for the most weeks in the top 40 of any album by either a female K-pop artist or a K-pop soloist of any gender.
“rosie” also held relatively steady at No. 35 in its 10th week on Billoard’s Top Current Album Sales chart.
Finally, Rosé maintained her position at No. 31 on Billboard’s Artist 100 this week, marking her 18th non-consecutive week on the chart as a soloist.
Congratulations to Rosé!
Read more >> : Cick here
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.
Even including groups and male acts, Rosé is now the first K-pop artist ever to reach the top 4 of the Radio Songs chart.
Additionally, “APT.” stayed strong at No. 2 in its 17th week on Billboard’s Global Excl. U.S. chart, No. 3 on the Global 200, No. 7 on the Hot 100, No. 11 on the Digital Song Sales chart, and No. 12 on the Streaming Songs chart.
Meanwhile, Rosé’s solo album “rosie” remained stable at No. 31 in its 10th week on the Billboard 200, extending its own record for the most weeks in the top 40 of any album by either a female K-pop artist or a K-pop soloist of any gender.
“rosie” also held relatively steady at No. 35 in its 10th week on Billoard’s Top Current Album Sales chart.
Finally, Rosé maintained her position at No. 31 on Billboard’s Artist 100 this week, marking her 18th non-consecutive week on the chart as a soloist.
Congratulations to Rosé! %23maine) |
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Twitter (X), Inc. was an American social media company based in San Francisco, California, which operated and was named for its flagship social media network prior to its rebrand as X. In addition to Twitter, the company previously operated the Vine short video app and Periscope livestreaming service
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