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How Jesse Plemons Came to Star in, Well, Pretty Much Everything

The most powerfully restrained of actors is an open book. He and wife Kirsten Dunst welcomed us into their L.A. home and to Mart, Texas, to meet his folks.

He’s uniquely adept at this kind of reveal, specializing in characters who are never purely good or bad—whose actions may be despicable (even Ed, his genial Midwestern butcher in Fargo, feeds a guy into a meat grinder) but whose motivations are understandable. Whistling through his teeth, Plemons led me into a den dominated by a pool table and offset by a small bar, stopping to show me an antique organ he’d picked up from a woman who claimed it had belonged to the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. On the wall by the bar hangs a one-of-a-kind test pressing of Bob Dylan’s “If Not for You,” a gift from a music supervisor friend who’d also installed his quadraphonic sound system, arranged around a couch that looks like it’s seen a lot of late nights.

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