Jesse Plemons: one of Hollywood’s most underrated actors
It’s not likely that you would have noticed, but the American actor Jesse Plemons has been plugging away in Hollywood since the turn of the new millennium despite only recently earning a morsel of the respect he deserves. An Oscar nominee, though he might be, Plemons constantly delivers exemplary performances and rarely gets the necessary credit for his efforts.
First taking to the screen back in 1998, albeit in a minor role as a ‘Hobo’ in the 1998 indie movie Finding North, Plemons took time rising to the cream of the Hollywood crop. Middling roles in seemingly random movie projects followed before Plemons was drafted in as the kicker in the beloved American football drama Friday Night Lights, booting off his successful industry career.
Largely preferring the allure of mysterious arthouse roles rather than the fleeting pleasure of blockbuster moviemaking, Plemons has since played a cult leader in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, a peculiar ‘Fomo-suffering’ police officer in 2018’s Game Night and a psychopathic computer programmer in one of Black Mirror’s finest episode, with the breadth of his dynamism truly knowing no bounds.
Miles away from being a glitzy Hollywood star, Plemons style can be defined by his remarkable restraint, playing authentic everyday characters who regularly hold something darker behind the eyes. Yet, he’s remarkable in his quietness, giving bulging allure to enigmatic characters who shouldn’t feel as curious as they inevitably become by the end of their arc.
Such is what makes the variety of his roles that much more fascinating, often playing snarling antagonists with the same tranquillity as his ‘normal’ supporting roles, giving an unparalleled villainy to these characters that can’t quite be matched anywhere else in Hollywood.
Just look at his thoroughly detestable character in the Emmy-award-winning AMC success Breaking Bad, playing Todd, an erratic employee who becomes the right-hand man of the protagonists, much to their dismay. Yet, despite the masterful, understated insidiousness of his character, Plemons was overlooked in favour of Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul, assumedly thanks to the actor’s lack of exaggerated theatricality.
“I’m drawn to characters [where] it’s not immediately obvious what their motives or intentions are,” Plemons admitted during an interview with Back Stage, “Where there’s a lot of space to kind of fill in the blanks”. Such can be applied to almost each and every one of his greatest characters, too, from his Oscar-nominated turn as the introverted ponderer George Burbank in Jane Campion’s gorgeous Power of the Dog to his most recent turn as Tom White in Martin Scorsese’s epic western Killers of the Flower Moon.
Perhaps the greatest disappointment of Scorsese’s latest, of which there are admittedly few, is that Plemons didn’t play as much of a part as his character does in David Grann’s non-fiction book of the same name. A rich and complex personality, seemingly ripped from the pages of the myth of the American West, the real-life individual that Plemons’ character is based on is exactly the kind of alluring enigma that the actor loves to indulge in, it’s just a shame that Scorsese chose to shift his focus elsewhere and reduce White to a bland enforcer of the law.
Properly utilising Plemons in a movie is like unleashing a formidable force of cinematic elegance, approaching his character not with the melodrama of a Hollywood egomaniac but with the grace and poise of a true master of the screen. It’s about time he was given a starring role to thrive in rather than being consistently reduced to the sidelines.
