The 2012 movie that convinced Jesse Plemons he was a character actor: “It was just really bizarre to me”
Earlier this year, Kirsten Dunst came to the defence of her husband, Jesse Plemons, after the academy snubbed his latest performance in Yorgos Lanthimos’ most recent postmodern undertaking, Bugonia.
It was a surprising intentional oversight from the academy, as Plemons’ eccentric, committed performance of paranoid conspiracy theorist Teddy Gatz came with all the spit, sweat, blood and grease of a master hard at work in the arena of superstardom. Plemons added to his previous bizarro body of work in the Lanthimos cinematic universe, building on his penchant for unique, often unlikeable, characters.
This type of commitment to character acting can sometimes be damaging for public image; if people come to know your face solely in connection to the fringes of society, usually tucked away by the overruling universal metanarrative that keeps us all in order, they may start associating you with dark, twisted ideals you momentarily embody, and thus an uncomfortable way of life.
But, for Plemons, this was an active choice, one he’s made ever since taking to the set of the 2012 sci-fi blockbuster, Battleship, on whose set he was reunited with Friday Night Lights director Peter Berg and co-star Taylor Kitsch, but that’s about where the familiarity and comforts ceased.
For Plemons, who played the Boatswain’s Mate Seaman Jimmy ‘Ordy’ Ord, a crew member on the USS John Paul Jones and a doubtful foil to Kitsch’s character, filming such a movie filled him with his own doubts. “What conclusions did I take away from Battleship?” Plemons was asked in a GQ interview, a cutting query which he answered pretty honestly: “That maybe I’m not cut out for this”.
Laughing, to indicate that the head-fuckery of the massive set at least didn’t stretch far into the consequential existential crisis, he continued, “It was just…it was just really bizarre to me, just the scale of it, and even just the catering and the amount of food. My God! It felt like this huge army”.
The team were flown out to Waikiki in Hawaii, Plemons first time visiting that part of the world, so the blockbuster commitment felt doubly estranging. The star added, “It’s a really strange place to work. And everyone else is in vacation mode. I just remember, like, lying awake at night. I don’t know if there was something wrong with the plumbing in this hotel, but you could hear every flush in this hotel. Like, what is happening?”
As he finished the movie, he moved on quickly to his next project, a collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson for The Master, an American period psychological drama film; thankfully, Plemons returned to what he knew and loved best, unravelling a character as far as they might go under the coveted director’s watchful eye. What he hated on the set of Battleship, he loved once more for The Master, recalling that the hit-making pair “discussed all the different possibilities for the character”.
When the interviewer suggested that he was “usually pegged as a character actor”, Plemons happily agreed with the opinion, admitting, “That’s all I ever really want to do”. It just so happens that it took an alien ship for him to come to that realisation.
