‘Rules go out the window’: Why Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons can’t say no to Yorgos Lanthimos

By the time Emma Stone and director Yorgos Lanthimos were doing the rounds of publicity for Poor Things, in which Stone played a crudely reincarnated adult woman with the brain of a baby, they had already shot their next movie. Kinds of Kindness was shooting, in fact, while the requisite special effects were being added to Poor Things. Lanthimos would shoot by day and review their work by night.

It sounds crazy, Stone agrees. “But you have to understand! We were like, ‘We have to go make this movie right now because everyone is going to think Poor Things is insane. Definitely!’” Once Poor Things was released, they reasoned, they might not get the money to make anything else.

As it turned out, Stone won her second Oscar as best actress for her tour-de-force performance as Bella Baxter, the stitched-together experimental subject made by Willem Dafoe’s mad scientist Godwin in Poor Things. The film played at the Venice Film Festival in September to huge ovations, became an arthouse hit and went on to win a slew of awards.

Emma Stone and director Yorgos Lanthimos on the set of Kinds of Kindness.

“Every single day after making that film, after work or after rehearsal, I would say to Yorgos, ‘How’s it going on Poor Things?’” says Stone. “And he would say, ‘It’s a colossal disaster.’ And then the response was just mind-blowing. But actually, Poor Things is a great example of the fact that there is no way to gauge anything.”

By the time Kinds of Kindness screened at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the question was whether the new film would measure up. Was it actually weirder than Poor Things? Kinds of Kindness consists of three stories, each played by the same group of eight actors – Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie, Hunter Schafer and Stone – but otherwise ostensibly unrelated. The one clear connection is that each story is about control, dominance and the mystery of willing submission.

“I don’t really know that I have expectations,” says Stone. ” I love this film. But I’ve had to learn to let that part go, really. There’s no way of knowing.”

Stone is 35. She has been acting since childhood in Arizona, when she found doing sketch comedy and improv at the local youth theatre helped ward off the panic attacks that frequently immobilised her. “You have to be present in improv, and that’s the antithesis of anxiety,” she said later. At 14, she prepared her parents a PowerPoint presentation explaining why she should drop out of high school, go to Los Angeles and shoot for a real career as an actor.

Somehow they were persuaded; after three years of doing odd episodes of sitcoms, commercials and working in a dog-treat bakery (sample goods: pup tarts) she was cast as Jonah Hill’s high-school crush in Superbad (2007). For a few years, the sardonic girl-next-door who holds her own with the boys was her go-to role. At 22, she was complaining of being typecast. Life has certainly moved along since then.

Emma Stone plays three characters in Yorgos Lanthimos’ triptych Kinds of Kindness.

There have been some significant waymarks in Stone’s rise to unimpeachable stardom, with La La Land, for which she won best actress at the 2017 Oscars, the most prominent. There were her years as Spider-Man’s girlfriend, which included a real-life partnership with then-Spidey Andrew Garfield. Then came her extended creative partnership with Lanthimos, doyen of the Greek Weird Wave, which has forged her career into something unique in Hollywood. The experience confirmed her determination to do only the work that interests her. “You know that phrase, ‘Interested people are interesting’?” she said in Cannes. “It’s like that. That idea of ‘one for me, one for them’, I don’t believe in that model at all.”

Her Lanthimos period began with The Favourite in 2018, where she played a lady-in-waiting vying for most-favoured status with Olivia Colman’s 18th- century monarch Queen Anne. They went on to make Poor Things, a short called Bleat, Kinds of Kindness and are now at work on Bugonia, a remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s sci-fi comedy Save the Green Planet! Plemons, who leads the ensemble in the three Kinds of Kindness stories, will also star in Bugonia. Lanthimos likes to work with a troupe.

Margaret Qualley, Jesse Plemons and Willem Dafoe in Kinds of Kindness.

Like Stone, Plemons has been acting since he was a child, having grown up in Texas with relatives who really did rope cattle and ride horses and set out to make TV westerns. His career has been solid rather than starry – he was a fan favourite in teen football drama Friday Night Lights and a stalwart in Breaking Bad – but his best-actor prize in Cannes for this film has made him a cover star, much to his own discomfort. At 36, Plemons is the newbie in Lanthimos’s madhouse.

“It’s not a comfortable place to be in, especially in the early stages,” he said in Cannes. “Everything is telling you, ‘No, I have to find a category, a box, I have to make some sense of this.’” But you can’t. “So, slowly … you give in to it.”

Plemons plays the central role in all three stories in Kinds of Kindness. First, he plays a corporate dweeb whose every move – what he eats, the person he marries, where he lives – is determined by his boss, a Machiavellian monster played by Dafoe, another Lanthimos regular. In the second story, he is a salt-of-the-earth policeman whose marine biologist wife goes missing; when she returns, he is convinced she is an imposter and tries to torture her into admitting it. In the third story, he and Stone are foot soldiers for a cult, searching for a promised Messiah who will raise the dead. All three were shot in under seven weeks.

Emma Stone, Yorgos Lanthimos and Jesse Plemons at a photo call for Kinds of Kindness at Cannes.

Drawing on his experience in Greek avant-garde theatre, Lanthimos puts his actors through trust exercises involving blindfolds and improvised dance moves and doesn’t explain anything.

“Technically speaking you are still acting, but so many rules go out of the window – and that, I think, is intentional, to try and exist in this place of exploration,” says Plemons. “One of the conversations we did have was about how he wasn’t interested in turning this into some extreme showy kind of, ‘Hey, look how different I am now!’ thing. The exciting thing was finding that line that differentiates the characters because they do feel like part of the same world.”

Lanthimos wrote the script with his most longstanding collaborator, Efthymis Filippou, who was his co-writer on Dogtooth, The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer – all films that were sourer and more provocative than The Favourite and Poor Things, both extravagant period mash-ups he made with Australian screenwriter Tony McNamara. There is something of Dogtooth’s oppressive patriarch in Dafoe’s power-tripping characters, but Lanthimos said in Cannes he had been thinking a good deal about the Roman emperor Caligula. “I started to imagine how, in our modern world, it would be if someone had such complete control over others,” he says.

Stone laments he didn’t tell her about Caligula in the first place, but quickly reconsiders: what difference would it have made? Both she and Plemons are still turning over what it all means.

“I think the elements of control are in everything he’s ever done,” says Stone. “That’s something very interesting to him. Who’s in charge? Do we want to be in charge of ourselves or do we want someone else to be? What does it mean to be loved?”

What indeed? Poor Things shocked some audiences with its frequent and freewheeling sex; there are some alarmingly frank sexual encounters in the new film that were, says Stone, made much simpler by the involvement of an excellent intimacy co-ordinator. “It’s so helpful, it makes it more like dancing than, you know, what it looks like,” she says.

Plemons chimes in. “I liken it to stunts, too – ‘Whoa, here we go!’ – But yeah, making sure everyone is comfortable. Having all the conversations we have to have. Because it’s always inherently really weird.”

Both actors are married with small children – Plemons to Kirsten Dunst, whom he met making the TV series Fargo, Stone to Dave McCary, a writer and director on Saturday Night Live with whom she is now also a partner in a production company, Fruit Tree. Stone has always refused to discuss any of her relationships; any interview puts her on edge. Lanthimos’ sexual frankness, by contrast, doesn’t bother her.

“Our job is as actors to bring more to the character through physicality. That’s my understanding of it and why I feel very comfortable and happy … being a person in a body,” she says. Anything taboo, she adds, is “Yorgos’ bread and butter … but I would argue violence features more prominently as a theme in this film than sex. There’s a lot of violence, whether inflicted upon people or upon ourselves.”

Including, for example, a scene in the story of the missing biologist where Plemons’ character demands his wife cut out her own liver to cook for his dinner. It makes you wonder about the film’s title: there is precious little kindness here. “It’s a pretty messed-up title,” agrees Plemons. “In a perfect way.”

Lanthimos is not about to disagree. He may even shed a little light on what it all means. The real world, he says in Cannes, is “crazy and sad a lot of times”. “Don’t you think that something is off with the world?” he asks the Cannes media. “Probably more so than with the films that I make. It is also ridiculous and funny.”

Crazy, sad, ridiculous, funny. It remains to be seen what the world will think of itself, seen through his eyes – but there just may be more Oscars around the corner.

Kinds of Kindness is released in cinemas on July 11.

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