Jesse Plemons Dramatic Weight Loss & Shocking ‘Civil War’ Cameo Revealed!

Jesse Plemons is utterly fatigued.

Stretched out on a couch in the luxurious Carlton Hotel in Cannes, his legs extended, bathed in the glow of the late Mediterranean sun, the actor keeps apologizing for occasionally losing his train of thought or stumbling over his sentences.

I can’t fault him. The past five years have been grueling.

Indeed, Plemons, 36, is probably just feeling the effects of the film festival grind. He has just come from the world premiere of his latest film “Kinds of Kindness,” the social demands of the Croisette party scene, a press briefing, and a marathon of interviews.

Nevertheless, he must have been somewhat drained even before all this, given his skyrocketing career trajectory: Since I interviewed him last for The Times in 2019 — a piece I now realize was wrongly titled “Being one of TV’s best character actors suits Jesse Plemons just fine” — he has collaborated with renowned filmmakers Jane Campion, Martin Scorsese, Alex Garland, and Yorgos Lanthimos, secured his first Oscar nomination and third Emmy recognition, and a week after our discussion, won the best actor award at Cannes. And he didn’t plan any of it.

“It’s a survival strategy,” says Plemons, who first gained recognition as a teenager in NBC’s high-school football drama “Friday Night Lights,” referring to his reluctance to plan his career moves. “I’ve been in this business for so long that it’s not really beneficial to look too far ahead. And that philosophy has served me well so far… I’m always looking at the next thing and following my instincts about what intrigues and excites me.”

With “Kinds of Kindness,” Lanthimos’ sequel to last year’s Oscar-winning “Poor Things,” Plemons found himself both anxious and excited. He admits he was sometimes disoriented by the Greek director’s “unconventional” methods, especially his rehearsals, which Plemons describes as more of a disorienting boot camp for actors than a script run-through.

“We mostly play these games,” Plemons reminisces, “engaging in these theatrical exercises that he’s learned, mastered, or invented over the years. After the first or second day, I thought, ‘Is all this just to confuse me? Is that why we’re doing this? Because it’s working.’” He disputes the notion that Lanthimos deliberately tries to be obscure or evasive. “You reach a point where you say, ‘Screw it!’ and it becomes incredibly fun and liberating and thrilling, and you realize, ‘This is a completely different way of working.’ You’re still doing the same thing, but the usual rules don’t necessarily apply.”

It may be this sense of liberation that allows Lanthimos, working again with his “Dogtooth” and “The Lobster” co-writer Efthimis Filippou, to consistently attract a troupe of recurring actors, including Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, and now Plemons. (Plemons has already signed on for Lanthimos’ next film, the thriller “Bugonia,” a remake of the Korean film “Save the Green Planet.”)

Set to hit theaters on June 21, “Kinds of Kindness,” features the aforementioned actors, along with Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie, Joe Alwyn, and Hunter Schafer, in three distinct stories. The film’s tone is closer to the cynical chill of “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” than the more cheerfully absurd, albeit still quirky, “Poor Things” or “The Favourite.” Plemons, who portrays a man punished for defying his boss, another grappling with his wife’s return from a near-death experience, and a third eager to impress the leaders of a cult, emerges alongside Stone as the film’s co-lead. Despite Lanthimos’ insistence that the film is a comedy, as Plemons dryly tells me, the unsettling themes underpinning the stories — forced sterilization, cannibalism, sexual assault — disturbed him as much as it will the audience.

”The second story really got under my skin and left me feeling somewhat queasy,” he says of the segment titled “R.M.F. Is Flying,” which subverts the cliché of the devoted wife praying for her husband’s survival and takes it to perverse extremes. “Not just because of the body horror, but also because of the intense emotions and feelings that Lanthimos’ work can evoke, which are difficult to process and articulate. That’s how I felt after reading the script — a feeling of sickness in my stomach. Not that I wasn’t incredibly excited, but there was something insidious about that effect.”

One recurring theme among Plemons’ characters in the film is their physical appearance, which initially worried the actor, who had lost weight before being offered the role in “Kinds of Kindness” and was concerned that Lanthimos wanted “the larger me.” In the first segment, “The Death of R.M.F.,” Plemons’ corporate drone adheres to a strict regimen imposed by his domineering boss (Dafoe), who quips, “Skinny men are the most ridiculous thing there is.” In the third segment, “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” Plemons is dressed in a suit so loose that it seems designed to highlight the actor’s slimness. Despite his initial concerns, Plemons says the transformation worked for the project, but he is already bracing for speculation about how he achieved it.

“It’s a shame that I decided to get healthy when everyone decided to take Ozempic,” he remarks. “Regardless, everyone will assume I took Ozempic anyway. But the truth is that as I got older, and — I hate to be specific because it turns into a whole thing, but there was a role I had in mind that I couldn’t envision as the size I was. Several people suggested intermittent fasting, and I decided to give it a try and was surprised at how quickly it worked. So I lost some weight before that role and then felt like I was in a rhythm, feeling better, and something clicked in my mind. I just sort of got a grip on it.”

That role led to perhaps the most buzzworthy scene in American cinema this year: Plemons’ chilling cameo as a volatile soldier overseeing a mass grave in Garland’s “Civil War.” The actor, who had just wrapped up filming the miniseries “Love & Death,” was looking forward to a break with his children while his wife Kirsten Dunst was shooting the speculative photojournalism drama in Atlanta. That’s when she called and asked him if he would step in for another actor who had dropped out.

“There was a part of me that was kind of like, ‘Oh, God,’ because that scene, even in the script, is — it’s the moment when your stomach lurches and you feel the whole energy of the story shift.”

Considering the urgency with which he took on the role, Plemons’ level of preparation is impressive: In a short time, he not only lost weight for the role, but also read Lt. Col. Dave Grossman’s renowned studies of soldier behavior “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 in Peace.” He credits Garland’s deep understanding of real-life situations involving “rogue soldiers that have been out too long” for inspiring the choice of the character’s distinctive red sunglasses.

“[Garland] also mentioned the structure of ‘Apocalypse Now,’ which also deals with these types of soldiers and the idea that they all start off looking as traditional as you can imagine, and over time they start changing and their appearances start transforming and they start picking up things.”

Just as Plemons’ portrayal of Todd Alquist in “Breaking Bad” prompted me to laud his significant influence on any scene he’s in, his small yet powerful performances in “Civil War” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” — as a federal agent investigating a series of suspicious Native American deaths — have led movie fans on social media to award Plemons the highest accolade for a character actor: When this guy shows up, you know the movie’s about to get good.

Plemons has seen the memes that his friends have shown him and he shrugs them off with a chuckle. But he never anticipated this kind of reaction any more than he planned his five-year career arc. He’s in it for the variety — different roles with different co-stars under different directors, each with their own “personalities and instincts and sensibilities.” (Sean Baker, recent Palme d’Or winner for “Anora,” “Bird’s” Andrea Arnold, and the Safdie brothers are some of the directors he’d like to work with.)

A dedicated film buff who studied Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy” before shooting “Kinds of Kindness” and spends part of our interview recommending Bill Douglas’ lesser-known trilogy of black-and-white shorts about a boy growing up in a Scottish mining town, Plemons’ only firm rule when choosing projects appears to be the desire to push his creative boundaries.

“Overthinking or being overly critical too soon is not beneficial,” he asserts. “There needs to be a brief period of exploration and discovery and experimentation, even if it’s just a take or two before we try to come to a definitive conclusion.”

As long as a role offers him this kind of flexibility, he’s open to whatever comes his way — even the “character actor” label that has followed him through a remarkable series of film and TV roles.

“Those were always the actors that I admired and drew inspiration from,” he admits. “I don’t really care about categorizations one way or the other, but I am someone who doesn’t care about the size of the role.”

This lack of ego is probably why Plemons has been in constant demand since our last conversation. Which director wouldn’t want to collaborate with an actor who can turn an uncredited cameo into a major talking point, or who is willing to fully immerse himself in a rehearsal process he doesn’t fully comprehend?

However, there’s one request from those of us who are keen to see him continue to improve the quality of movies for the next five years: Please let the man have some rest.