The only director who left Jesse Plemons starstruck: “One of my favourites”
Although he first became known for playing the sweetheart high school football player Landry in Friday Night Lights, and later the dastardly criminal Todd in Breaking Bad, Jesse Plemons has become one of the most talented actors of his generation and has earned the endorsement of some serious talent.
The actor’s trajectory on television extended even further thanks to his Emmy-nominated roles on Fargo and Black Mirror, but when it comes to movies, he’s only worked with the best of the best.
If a great actor could be judged by the amount of great directors they have worked with, Plemons has left all of his peers in the dust, for in less than four decades, he’s managed to appear in films directed by Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson, Yorgos Lanthimos, Jane Campion, Scott Cooper, Stephen Frears, Doug Liman, Adam McKay, and Alex Garland, among others.
Although he has built up hype surrounding each of his upcoming performances, as his name seems to suggest quality, there was a particular degree of anticipation for his collaboration with Charlie Kaufman on I’m Thinking of Ending Things, a complex psychological thriller based on the popular novel of the same name. While the latter is regarded as perhaps the greatest living screenwriter, he has only occasionally sat in the director’s chair for the Philip Seymour Hoffman drama Synecdoche, New York and the R-rated animated Anomalisa.
The beguiling, unusual style of filmmaking that Kaufman has employed is certain to be intimidating, even for an actor of Plemons’ reputation, who admitted to being starstruck meeting him for the first time, as he was already a huge fan.
“He’s been one of my favourites for quite a while,” he said, “One of my buddies and I, a few years ago, had a Charlie Kaufman marathon and started at the beginning and worked our way to the end. I guess the thinking was that surely by the end of that, we would have some epiphany and some of Charlie’s brilliance might rub off on us. It did not. It just made us realise how much we love him.”
I’m Thinking of Ending Things proved to be one of the most complex films that either Kaufman or Plemons ever made, as it pulled off a significant plot twist revolving around the identity of a character played by Jessie Buckley that would have only been noticeable to those who were paying attention closely.
This meant the film struggled to connect with a broad audience, also considering that it debuted on Netflix in the fall of 2020, when theatres around the world were still mostly shut down, making it an unfortunate reality that I’m Thinking of Ending Things didn’t become a major award season success.
It is among the very few films from the new decade that could be called a masterpiece, and the work that Plemons did is bound to have significant ramifications on his career, as it is a performance that will stand the test of time. Some films may have to wait years, and at times decades, before they are appreciated fully, and I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a cult classic in the making that is just begging to be rediscovered.
