Jesse Plemons’s All-American Horror

Jesse Plemons appears for all of seven minutes in Alex Garland’s discombobulating Civil War, but in the tradition of Hollywood’s great bench players, it’s enough time to nearly run away with the whole thing. We encounter him when our traveling war reporters — Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst, Plemons’s real-life partner), Jessie Cullen (Cailee Spaeny), Joel (Wagner Moura), and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) — inadvertently stumble onto a farm where militiamen, led by Plemons’s unnamed ultranationalist, are pouring bodies into a mass grave. The film never clarifies what’s up with these guys or what led to this particular moment, but that’s par for the course with Civil War’s pinhole lens. Garland deliberately obfuscates the politics shaping his near-future America, so what something has to do with anything else is usually vague.

One thing’s for sure, though: Plemons is bad news. What ensues is an agonizing sequence as his character, clad in paramilitary gear and a pair of red bro shades fit for Coachella, holds our protagonists captive alongside two other journalists from Hong Kong (Nelson Lee and Evan Lai). The scene is pregnant with contemporary political horror, seizing the image of rogue white militiamen that American viewers might identify with the mob that stormed the Capitol or the group that conspired to kidnap the governor of Michigan. It’s one of several provocative visuals that Civil War conjures throughout its road trip. Prior to this, the reporters stopped at a gas station, where three men were torturing looters; they were embedded in a shoot-out between the U.S. military and “the Florida Alliance”; and they got pinned down in a surreal sniper battle at a winter amusement park. But the mass-grave scene stands apart, a feat owing in no small part to Plemons’s effortlessly terrifying performance. “We’re Americans,” Joel pleads after the ultranationalist casually executes one of the Asian journalists. Plemons’s response is him at his most frightening: He’s calm, quiet, thoroughly unpredictable. “Okay,” he replies with a flat affect, subtle flashes of the actor’s Texan accent hanging beneath each syllable. “Well, what kind of American are you?”

Now, I’m a huge Plemons-head. He’s an actor whose appearance onscreen, no matter how big or small, always makes me turn to the person next to me and whisper, “I love that guy.” He has this great open face, equally capable of fading into the background or snapping your attention into focus. It’s easy to read an Everyman quality in him, which likely has a lot to do with the strong naturalism he brings to his performances. Traditionally, these traits have made him an ideal fit for characters who are fundamentally sweet and sincere. Think of Landry Clarke in Friday Night Lights (even with the bizarro plot point in which he killed some guy) or Ed Blumquist in Fargo’s second season. But when Plemons swaps out that sweetness for menace, a trade that happens somewhat frequently, the results are chilling. Scary Jesse Plemons is a dude who immediately puts you on edge. Nothing feels safe in his presence, and his great open face turns into a cold stare powerful enough to tip the universe off-balance.

Of course, Scary Jesse Plemons has quite a history. Landry might have been the actor’s breakout role, but shortly after Friday Night Lights concluded in 2011, Plemons appeared on Breaking Bad’s final season as Todd Alquist, the enterprising young sociopath who turns out to be closely connected to a neo-Nazi gang that hovers over Breaking Bad’s endgame like a malevolent supernatural force. The horror of Todd is not entirely dissimilar to the horror of Plemons’s ultranationalist in Civil War. Both draw from the same vein of political horror symbolized by the white American male. That Plemons routinely plays men in positions of state power in his other screenwork — police officers (American Made, Antlers), FBI agents (Killers of the Flower Moon, Judas and the Black Messiah), lawyers (The Post) — only adds to the menacing layers his image can evoke.

Earlier in his career, Plemons drew comparisons to Philip Seymour Hoffman, particularly after starring as the son to the late actor’s L. Ron Hubbard–esque cult leader in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012). But the likening isn’t quite right. With Hoffman, you get the sense of seeing an anarchic mind at work, and this is the quality that defined the threat he brought, say, as Freddie in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1995) or as the villain Owen Davian in Mission: Impossible III (2006). Scary Philip Seymour Hoffman characters can clearly outthink you, but they’re not altogether unreasonable. In many respects, Plemons’s onscreen energy seems to come from the opposite direction. It’s not that he plays men who aren’t thinkers; they’re just unmovable. A Scary Jesse Plemons character is one you can see processing the situation, but they cannot be bargained with once they land on a decision. To be in the crosshairs of Scary Jesse Plemons is to be in the radius of a geological disaster.

Game Night (2018) may well be the film that understands this most acutely. Plemons’s turn as Gary the creepy cop neighbor is one of the best things in John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein’s excellent comedy, and the role pulls from all the core components of a Scary Jesse Plemons character. “Three Tostitos bags, I see,” he says in one scene when he’s trying to catch Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams in a lie as the two attempt to stage a game night without him. “How could that possibly be profitable for Frito-Lay?” The line delivery is perfect. Once again, Plemons’s affect is flat, a little slow, somewhere above a mumble. He often sounds as if he’s eating his words. In more personable contexts, that speech cadence projects a shy, charming boyishness. But in Gary’s mouth, that same voice inverts to communicate a dangerously literal thinker — a presence who gives off more machine than man.

There can also be a certain unreadability to Plemons’s face that amps up his more unsettling characters. Some of this flows from the actor’s naturally smaller eyes, which in Civil War are further obscured behind those ridiculous red sunglasses. But even when you can see them, those eyes can convey a distance that makes it hard to tell what’s on Plemons’s mind. In Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020), he plays Jessie Buckley’s boyfriend, Jake, whom she’s planning to break up with but is still following back home for the holidays. Here, the actor’s inscrutable quality plugs directly into the surreal nature of the work. This is already a film in which reality isn’t terribly static: The name of Buckley’s protagonist constantly shifts, while Toni Collette and David Thewlis, who play Jake’s parents, appear and reappear as younger and older versions of themselves. That all creates an air of ambient horror, but the film’s most destabilizing layer is Jake himself. He’s awkward, quiet, extremely inward-folding. Trapped in the car with him for long stretches, Buckley’s protagonist is in the uneasy presence of a man who intermittently flashes a short temper, raising a natural set of questions: Who is this guy, really? What’s going on with him? Is he dangerous?

It’s fun, if a little inelegant, to lump Plemons’s performance in the Black Mirror episode “USS Callister” into the pantheon of Scary Jesse Plemons characters, even though Robert Daly, the put-upon CTO who channels his anger into torturing virtual avatars of people he knows in real life, feels very different from Jake, Gary, or Todd. A portrait of an incel, Daly is a broader, louder, more obviously angry creation, though Plemons does get to have a lot of fun losing his shit in the role. But Daly nevertheless functions as a kind of key that illustrates the horror of taciturn, unreadable men like Jake, Gary, and Todd. What’s going on behind those red college-bro sunglasses? Well, let me tell ya: You probably don’t want to know.

Scott Cooper, a director with whom Plemons has worked on several films, once described Jesse Plemons characters to Texas Monthly as “guys who just stand up and tell the truth.” There’s something uniquely American about this conception, one that nods toward the (perhaps mythological) idea of the American as an avatar of authenticity. It’s a good shorthand for Plemons’s naturalistic performance style, and it’s interesting how the description cuts in all directions. It’s one thing if we’re talking about Plemons’s more delightful and humanistic roles: the loving husband, the young lawyer, the loyal friend. It’s another altogether when the person standing up and telling their truth is the ultranationalist, the creepy cop neighbor, the wannabe meth mogul. This, perhaps, is the molten heart of Scary Jesse Plemons characters. When they appear, what you see is a kind of all-American horror.