‘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

Jesse Plemons is a successful young actor, instinctive and natural, who likes to inhabit every role he takes on. He can play lead or support; light comedy or dark drama; the cornfed all-American or his curdled, troubled cousin. The 36-year-old can handle any part, it seems, except that of Jesse Plemons, a successful young actor with a new film to promote. Now, all at once, he is ill at ease. He regards the hotel couch as though it’s a dentist’s chair. “These are two completely different skills,” he confides. “Acting, I& mean, and whatever we’re doing right now.”

He has worked as an actor since he was a kid, and figured he’d found a comfortable level of fame, strolling from Coke commercials to roles in Friday Night Lights and Breaking Bad. Yet all the while he has been like the apocryphal frog in the pan, coming to the boil without realising. “This is taking some time to navigate,” he says, “being in the public eye. Doing interviews. Somehow trying to have a human conversation.”