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‘I don’t want to take these characters home’: Jesse Plemons on life playing the psychopath next door

Chilling performances in Breaking Bad, Civil War and now Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness have made the actor cinema’s go-to wrong ‘un – but the roles he plays can be hard to shake off

Shot at speed over seven weeks by Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos, the film spins three uncanny black comedies featuring the same cast of players (Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn). He was chilling as fresh-faced Todd Alquist, the deferential psychopath from Breaking Bad, profoundly disquieting as the lead-weight boyfriend in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, and purely scary as the rose-sunglasses-sporting militia man, squaring up to his real-life wife Kirsten Dunst’s character in Alex Garland’s Civil War. As a kid he was fascinated by the TV miniseries Lonesome Dove, starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones as retired Texas Rangers, in part because it showed him a world he half knew.

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