The stars in Jesse Plemons’ rise

The American actor, who makes a habit of working with Hollywood greats, talks about his new role with Robert de Niro in Netflix series Zero Day.

Jesse Plemons in New York in June. Picture: Getty Images

If you want an idea of how good an actor Jesse Plemons is, and how much Hollywood knows it, just look at who he has worked with. Plemons has been directed by Martin Scorsese twice (The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon), Steven Spielberg twice (Bridge of Spies and The Post), Jane Campion (The Power of the Dog)and Yorgos Lanthimos twice (Kinds of Kindness, for which he won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival, and the forthcoming Bugonia). He has starred with Tom Cruise twice, Christian Bale twice and Robert De Niro three times, including in Zero Day, a gripping new political mini-series on Netflix. On top of that Plemons has been in some of the best TV shows of the past 20 years: Friday Night Lights, the high school football drama where he got his break, Breaking Bad, Black Mirror and Fargo, where he met his wife, actor Kirsten Dunst. Not bad for 36.

Plemons’s unique selling point has been the ability to project wholesomeness and brutality, sometimes simultaneously. In Breaking Bad he played Todd Alquist, who seemed like a normal guy until he unhesitatingly murdered a young boy, and in Civil War he was an unnamed militiaman who casually executed two reporters for not being “American”. Plemons was only on screen for a few minutes but he loomed over that film.

Plemons with Robert De Niro on the set of Zero Day.

His character in Zero Day, however, is something new. Roger Carlson is a driven and slippery aide to De Niro’s George Mullen, a respected former US president who is hauled out of retirement to head a commission investigating a global cyber attack that brought down planes and made trains crash. With his sharp suit, swish haircut and shadowy past, Carlson “felt a little like a talent agent to me, where your whole purpose is to protect. I’ve never played anyone like that”, Plemons says when we meet at a hotel in central London. He is noticeably slimmer these days, having lost 23kg – which he has said is the result of intermittent fasting rather than Ozempic. He chews on a toothpick throughout – is it a nervous tic or affectation? He is from Texas, I suppose.

Zero Day combines the sweaty intrigue of All the President’s Men with the slick realpolitik of the Netflix adaptation of House of Cards, and has impressive brainpower behind the camera. Its creators are Eric Newman, the man behind Narcos; Noah Oppenheim, a former president of NBC News who wrote Jackie, the 2016 film about Jackie Kennedy, and; Michael S. Schmidt, a Pulitzer prizewinning political correspondent for The New York Times. The biggest draw for Plemons, though, was “the guy playing Mullen” starring in his first TV series.

The prospect of five months on set with De Niro would not fill everyone with joy: his appearances on the publicity trail for Zero Day have been hilariously taciturn. When asked on The Graham Norton Show if he had any Oscar tips for Anora actor and Oscar nominee Mikey Madison, who was also on the show, De Niro responded with a terse “no”. So him saying he was “very happy” that Plemons was involved in Zero Day is a whooping, cartwheeling endorsement.

They first acted together in The Irishman, in which Plemons played the foster son of Al Pacino’s Jimmy Hoffa. “I had to drive Pacino and De Niro around (on camera) with their lives in my hands, which was stressful,” he says. “I was basically just acting like I wasn’t nervous – that was as good as I felt I could do.” The second time was in Killers of the Flower Moon. “I felt a little more comfortable, felt like we knew each other a little bit better, and with Zero Day it was as much as I’ve gotten to work one on one with him. Occasionally you kind of forget. You know, it’s still acting. You just happen to be doing it with one of the best of all time.”

Plemons with Ray Romano, De Niro and Al Pacino in The Irishman.

De Niro is “very good at putting you at ease”, he says, which may be news to Norton. Plemons was also impressed with the 81-year-old’s stamina. A six-episode series is “gruelling, like shooting three films at once. He’s in practically every scene, there was an enormous amount of dialogue and I think I saw him yawn once”. A born outsider, De Niro doesn’t seem like the obvious man to play a member of the establishment, especially one who is known for reaching across the aisle between Democrats and Republicans – the actor is liberal to his boots. Yet you buy him as Mullen – perhaps the aura of a Hollywood legend has something in common with the aura of a former president. “Command and presence, that’s built in,” Plemons says. Maybe he should run for president in real life? He laughs. “That’s a tough gig.”

For research Plemons read The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis, by George Stephanopoulos, a former aide to Bill Clinton, and watched The War Room and The Last Party, documentaries about the 1992 presidential race between Clinton and George Bush Sr. Physical proximity to power is everything, he learnt: “Vying for that seat closest to the leader.” Stephanopoulos was crushed when he lost his office next to Clinton, just as Carlson is when turfed out from his by Mullen’s incoming chief of staff (Connie Britton, his former co-star in Friday Night Lights).

It is kept vague whether Mullen and the serving president, Evelyn Mitchell (Angela Bassett), are Democrats or Republicans. “When you do get into the specifics of a political party, it gives you an out immediately as a viewer to either say, ‘I’m for this person’ or ‘I’m against them’. Something disengages as you’re watching,” Plemons says. “We don’t really need any more of that.” Perhaps with that in mind, he doesn’t want to talk about his own politics, although I’d be surprised if he wasn’t a Democrat.

De Niro said recently, “Right now, our actual world is scarier” than the one in Zero Day, and Plemons agrees. Political polarisation, he says, was at the heart of why Alex Garland made Civil War, which imagined open conflict between a Washington elite and a secessionist movement in Texas and California. Garland told Plemons that he remembered a time growing up when his parents had conversations with people who had different political beliefs, without connecting those beliefs to whether someone was a good or bad person. How quaint. “One of the gifts of being an actor is that, whether or not you’re playing a character whom you agree with, you’re trying to find out why they think that way,” Plemons says.

Plemons with wife Kirsten Dunst. Picture: Getty Images.

Not that putting himself into the mindset of his character in Civil War was a doddle, given that he was a psychopath for whom killing had become like tying his shoelaces. “I have played some pretty awful characters but after shooting that scene I’ve never needed a shower more,” Plemons says. Taking place next to an open mass grave, the sequence also featured Dunst, playing a war photographer. “I was grateful that we didn’t have a ton of interaction,” he says.

Asked about her emotions at the time, Dunst said she felt more admiration than fear: “Dang, my baby is crushing this role ... f..k, he’s a good actor.”

They had worked together before, playing husband and wife in Fargo and The Power of the Dog, for which they were both nominated for Oscars. Plemons says sharing the screen has never felt strange, given it’s how they met. “I remember Kirsten saying when we were doing The Power of the Dog – because it was such a different version of marriage and such different people from ourselves – how cheesy it felt.” It’s hard to see the desolate western as cheesy, but maybe anything can be when compared with real life.

Plemons was born in Dallas, the son of a firefighter and a special needs teacher, and grew up in Mart, a small town about 160km further south. He started acting young, appearing in a Coca-Cola commercial aged three, and would spend half the year at home and the other half going to Los Angeles with his mum or dad for pilot season, when hopefuls audition for parts in new TV shows. It sounds like a strange childhood but flitting between a red state and the west coast meant he was “exposed to many different types of people”, for which he is grateful in these divided times. He sings, plays guitar and writes songs, including Lonely Room, the darkly dramatic track that closes I’m Thinking of Ending Things, the 2020 Charlie Kaufman film in which he starred.

He, Dunst and their sons Ennis, 6, and James, 3, live in Los Angeles and Austin but are based in Budapest for now, where Dunst is filming The Entertainment System Is Down, the new film from director Ruben Ostlund (Triangle of Sadness). “Our kids are getting to a point where we have to be selective about when we decide to pull them out of school,” Plemons says. “There was a time when there just was not another alternative and it was worth it because of the project.”

Plemons in the TV series Fargo.

There have been a few must-do projects recently, including Bugonia, which he shot last summer in the UK. This being Lanthimos, it sounds bonkers: Plemons plays a beekeeping conspiracy theorist who kidnaps the CEO of a big pharmaceutical company, played by Emma Stone. “It was wild, really funny, really dark – and really relevant,” he says. “This feeling of being overlooked and lost, searching for something that makes the world make sense.” Has he ever felt like that? “I would assume most people have at one point or ­another.”

Plemons is now yo-yoing between Budapest and London, where he is shooting the untitled new film by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the brilliant Mexican filmmaker who directed Birdman and The Revenant. It reunites Plemons with Cruise, with whom he starred in American Made in 2017. Does having worked together before reduce the awe factor, as it did with De Niro? “Most definitely helps a little bit. I was just recently working with (Cruise) and he was incredibly nice and generous and outstanding in the part.” Details about the film are carefully guarded but “it feels like a step in a new direction for­ ­Inarritu”.

That’s the umpteenth master Plemons has crossed off his list. Who is left? He would love to work with Lynne Ramsay, the Scottish director of Ratcatcher and We Need to Talk About Kevin, and the Safdie brothers, the New Yorkers who did Good Time and Uncut Gems. What else does he have coming up? “A break!” he says. “Hanging out with the kiddos, playing guitar and taking a bunch of photos of the family.”

As much as you want him to enjoy his downtime, it can’t be long before there’s another call from a world-beating director.

The Times

Zero Day is on Netflix