The performance Jesse Plemons called the hardest of his career: “The third act is a lot”
In recent years, Jesse Plemons has emerged as one of the most reliably excellent actors in Hollywood.
Anyone who saw his work in Breaking Bad knew that he was good, but recently, he has gotten exceptionally good at picking his projects, with very few misses since the dawn of the 2020s, and, even when the overall product isn’t great, he’s usually the best thing about it (looking at you, Civil War).
He was only in one movie in the whole of 2025, and boy, was it a good one, and he continued his fruitful partnership with Yorgos Lanthimos by starring in his psychological sci-fi drama, Bugonia, playing Teddy Gatz, a damaged young conspiracy theorist convinced that high-powered CEO Emma Stone’s Michelle Fuller is secretly an alien. Alongside his autistic cousin Don, played by Aiden Delbis, he kidnaps Michelle in an attempt to get her to confess, making for an absolutely fantastic piece of cinema, while also giving us the nugget of knowledge that Emma Stone believes in aliens; can’t ask for more than that.
Bugonia not only pleased this sad man on the internet, but rather, almost everybody who saw it as it was followed by rave reviews across the board, nominated for multiple categories at the Golden Globes, and there’s every chance it could appear at the upcoming Academy Awards. Plemons definitely suffered for his art, though, speaking with Vanity Fair, and he called the movie one of the hardest things he’s ever done.
“The third act is a lot,” he said, “It’s not actual hard work in the sense of manual labour or anything like that, but it was just the hardest thing I’ve ever done, really, to try and maintain that level of a crescendo all through the third act and to try and be truthful in that.”
Most of Bugonia is pretty out there, but the final third is when it really gets nutty; spoilers ahead, by the way, if you haven’t already seen it.
After Don can’t take any more and kills himself, Michelle manages to convince Teddy that he is an alien leader in a bid to free herself, and what follows is a string of insane visuals, ranging from Teddy blowing his own head off with a homemade suicide vest to Michelle revealing herself as an actual alien to the death of the entire human race. Of all the endings in 2025, it was up there with the craziest.
Plemons wasn’t the only one who struggled as things got so intense that Lanthimos announced he would be taking a break from filmmaking in the not-too-distant future. He was brought onto the movie relatively late, after Jang Joon-hwan (the Korean director of the film Bugonia is based on) pulled out. Filming took place on both sides of the Atlantic, wherein Lanthimos attempted to film the final scene at the Acropolis in his native Greece, but was unable to obtain permission.
In this writer’s humble opinion, the strain Plemons, Lanthimos, and everyone involved in Bugonia put themselves through was totally worthwhile. It’s a wonderful film, easily one of the best of the year, but will that be any comfort to the exhausted stars? Almost certainly not, but at least I tried.
