Unbelievable Luck Behind the Most Shocking ‘Civil War’ Scene You Won’t Believe!

Caution: The article below includes spoilers for “Civil War.”

The United States is in chaos in “Civil War.” The Western Forces, a military alliance between Texas and California, is on the brink of retaking a besieged capital. A group of journalists journey from New York City to Washington, D.C., with the aim of conducting a final interview with the president, who has illegally served a third term and has turned rogue.

Throughout their journey, Lee (Kirsten Dunst), a seasoned photojournalist who has covered conflicts around the globe, reluctantly mentors the novice Jessie (Cailee Spaeny). Lee sees a reflection of her younger self in Jessie and wishes to shield her from the disillusionment and disappointment she has experienced. Despite all her work, she feels it has ultimately been futile as the country hurtles towards a seemingly inevitable catastrophe.

The movie, penned and directed by Alex Garland, known for his bleak, dystopian narratives such as “Ex Machina” and “Annihilation,” treads a fine line, careful not to lean too much towards any political stance. Often, it is not clear who is aligned with whom, as if everyone is caught up in a mesmerizing whirl of conflict.

No scene embodies the film’s intricate balancing act more than one featuring actor Jesse Plemons in a cameo role. Spaeny’s character momentarily gets separated from her fellow journalists, including Joel (Wagner Moura) and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson). When the group finally locates Jessie, she is held at gunpoint along with another journalist by a small group of militiamen who are disposing of corpses into a makeshift mass grave.

An unidentified soldier of ambiguous loyalty, played by Plemons, appears to be in command. As Dunst’s character Lee, Joel, Sammy, and another journalist try to devise a plan, they decide to confront the soldiers in an attempt to rescue Jessie and their colleague.

Plemons’ soldier, idly handling his assault rifle while sporting unsettling red plastic sunglasses, interrogates the group with a chilling calmness. He demands they each answer what has become the film’s signature question: “What kind of American are you?”

He begins to shoot anyone whose response he dislikes, revealing his blatant racism and xenophobia. Just as he seems about to target Jessie, Sammy disrupts the scene, running over Plemons’ character with their truck, allowing them to escape – albeit not without casualties.

Plemons’ unnerving portrayal of a cold-blooded psychopath is one of the most frightening aspects of “Civil War,” and his scene is a crucial turning point, propelling the journalists towards the movie’s final act.

In reality, Dunst and Plemons are a married couple with two kids. Having first met while filming a season of the TV series “Fargo,” they also starred together in Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog,” which earned them both Oscar nominations.

In a recent interview with Spaeny, Dunst discussed what it was like to act with her partner, particularly since he had to play such a disturbing character.

“I think Lee’s mindset in this scene is: We just have to survive this and get out alive,” Dunst says. “So, I wasn’t afraid of him as an actor. It’s an odd question because Jesse and I initially fell in love creatively as actors and how we work together. We just love that process.”

Dunst continues, “I’m going to be completely honest — watching him play that role, I thought, ‘Wow, my husband is absolutely nailing this role.’ So that’s how I felt. I was like, ‘Damn, he’s a good actor.’ The situation was very frightening, but I wasn’t scared of him. But just witnessing the mass grave and everything around me was terrifying.”

Shooting the scene was nonetheless unique for Dunst compared to her co-stars. “The other actors and their reactions to Jesse were more terrifying to me in terms of what was actually happening in the scene,” adds Dunst. “But I didn’t really interact with him in that scene. Basically, he asked me where I’m from, and I answered, ‘Colorado.’ So it wasn’t like he was doing things to me as he was to Cailee and the other characters in that scene, which was terrifying because the situation was terrifying.”

Spaeny’s experience of the scene was quite different. Two days of filming in the scorching Atlanta sun started to wear on her. The movie was shot in chronological order, so the events of the film began to have an accumulative impact on the actors.

“Once we got to that scene, it was very frightening for me,” says Spaeny, noting that the first part of the scene focused on Dunst, Moura, and Henderson devising a rescue plan from a distance while she and Plemons were separate from everyone else. “So, I was down there with Jesse for about half a day, completely in character, drilling me, improvising the whole scene.

“And so, by the end of that scene, I think we were all really out of it. You do it that many times and it just sort of gets under your skin.”

Spaeny went on to explain that Garland and cinematographer Rob Hardy had arranged the scene so that no cameras were visible, with Hardy hiding in the pit that was supposed to be a mass grave.

“And so you didn’t see some crew member wandering in the background eating a bag of chips — you didn’t have a traditional close-up,” says Spaeny. “It felt very immersive. That stunt sequence was incredible. And by the time we all got into that car, when Stephen comes and picks us up, God, it felt really real. That whole sequence. The scene, as it’s written, is completely chilling. And then the performances that I was surrounded by, it was just that combination, doing it over and over again for two days straight. It just gets to you.”

Plemons was not Garland’s initial choice for the role. Approximately a week before the start of principal photography, another actor who was cast in the role, whom Garland chooses not to name, had to withdraw. Garland remembers finding out he had lost the other actor while on the phone outside the rehearsal space where the cast was preparing.

“I was standing on the street when I got the call and I thought, ‘Oh, no. Now we’re in trouble,’” says the director. “And so I went to the rehearsal and said ‘Bad news, guys, so and so can’t do it.’ And Kirsten said, ‘What? You should ask Jesse.’ And I thought, Oh, that would be amazing.”

“Jesse was around,” says Dunst. “I was like, ‘Let’s just ask Jesse to play this role.‘”

“It was an incredible stroke of luck,” says Garland. “That makes it sound like I’m being disrespectful to the other actor. I’m not at all. It’s just the film was very fortunate to get Jesse.”

The climactic moment of Plemons’ scene, when a truck hits him, is eliciting wildly different reactions. At the film’s world premiere at South by Southwest, one theatre audience cheered while another sat in stunned silence.

As they proceed, Sammy reveals he has been shot. By the time they reach the relative safety of a Western Forces military base, he has passed away. Lee later looks at her camera, seeing a picture of Sammy’s body slumped in the backseat of their vehicle. In a moment of poignant tenderness, she erases it.

“We shot that scene several different ways: I don’t delete it, I delete it, I was crying, I wasn’t crying,” Dunst recalls. “There were many different versions of that. And that’s the version that Alex chose to tell for Lee’s character. So the decision was made for me in the edit because we just did a bunch of different options.”

Dunst remembers working through the emotions of the moment. “I would just put myself in Lee’s shoes,” she says. “If a mentor for me, if I was with them during their death — whatever that meant for me. But I think the decision for Lee was to keep that for herself in her memory. And she didn’t need a photo. It’ll be a photo in her brain for the rest of her life.”

In an early scene in the movie, one of the first pieces of advice that Lee gives to Jessie is to wear a helmet. And during an early firefight in the film, Dunst, Spaeny, and Moura are indeed all wearing helmets. But then they never wear them again, even during the climactic military attack on the White House.

“We’re just saying we lost them,” explains Dunst with a knowing smile. “That was a big debate, believe me. And I don’t know how much I should share, but basically, for cinema, we weren’t totally sure if you wanted to see your characters through the whole movie in helmets.

Dunst says she thought she looked like Goldie Hawn in “Private Benjamin” when wearing her helmet. Spaeny had concerns of her own.

“You can’t see my eyes,” she says with a small laugh. “It’s realism until the point you can’t see my face.”

Part of what makes “Civil War” so compelling is how believable it is, portraying people at their best and worst, driven by self-interest and petty fears. The film’s stark sense of reality also leads to a deep concern for these journalists urgently heading towards danger, helmets or not.

“It was a cinematic choice with that one,” Dunst says. “I feel like in every other thing, we tried to make it as real as possible.”