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NEW YORK – When Jesse Plemons signed on to play an unhinged conspiracy theorist in \u201cBugonia,\u201d he hadn\u2019t quite registered how much time he\u2019d be spending in a beekeeper suit.<\/p>\n
Running in a beekeeper suit. Kidnapping Emma Stone\u2019s enigmatic pharma CEO in a beekeeper suit. Committing outrageous acts of violence in a beekeeper suit. Furiously biking (while overcome with regret for said acts of violence) in a beekeeper suit. All while shooting the absurdist comedy in the middle of a \u201cboiling\u201d summer.<\/p>\n
Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post. <\/a><\/p>\n \u201cIt was pretty hot in that bee suit, I\u2019ll tell you that much!\u201d Plemons says.<\/p>\n It\u2019s been over a year since Plemons shot \u201cBugonia\u201d – his second film in two years sparring with Stone in a surrealist farce from Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos (\u201cPoor Things,\u201d \u201cThe Favourite\u201d) – and the 37-year-old actor is no longer covered in \u201cunceasing sweat,\u201d as The Post\u2019s critic aptly described his paranoid (and maybe prescient?) character, Teddy.<\/p>\n Rather, on a recent October morning, Plemons is relaxing in the outdoor garden of a Tribeca hotel wearing a rumpled white T-shirt, black pants and a thin gray cardigan, while sipping on iced green tea.<\/p>\n There is something poetic about Plemons getting the most attention-grabbing role of his career in a movie with so many bees (in several scenes, he\u2019s swarmed by them). His great skill is in being an ensemble player, a worker, an everyman – a humble character actor\u2019s actor who is so naturalistic, so crucial to the success of every project he\u2019s in, that you might not clock how nuanced a performance he\u2019s giving until he reveals hidden depths and darkness.<\/p>\n He broke out at 19 as awkward nerd Landry Clarke on \u201cFriday Night Lights,\u201d impressed audiences as a polite meth cook on \u201cBreaking Bad\u201d and has in the last few years skyrocketed as a secret weapon of auteurs: Martin Scorsese, Charlie Kaufman, Jane Campion, Shaka King and now Lanthimos.<\/p>\n His first and only Oscar nomination, a supporting nod in 2022, came in Campion\u2019s \u201cPower of the Dog,\u201d in which he played a rancher pining after Kirsten Dunst – his actual wife. The two met when Plemons played her doting butcher\u2019s assistant spouse on FX\u2019s 2015 season of \u201cFargo.\u201d Both got Emmy nominations and they bonded over being child actors – Plemons mostly played bullies on shows like \u201cWalker, Texas Ranger\u201d – who came out okay.<\/p>\n The pair, Dunst has said, \u201cfell in love creatively first.\u201d Now they have two sons, Ennis, 7, and James, 4.<\/p>\n Plemons\u2019s relationship with Dunst, and coverage of it in pop-culture rags, swooning over how genuine, sweet and creatively supportive they seem, may be the missing ingredient that\u2019s vaulted his career to a new echelon.<\/p>\n He\u2019s always been mesmerizing, with, as Los Angeles Times critic Amy Nicholson puts it, \u201ca knack for playing characters who are doggedly, dangerously obtuse,\u201d but casting agents and directors are now finally seeing him as an endlessly surprising master actor – with, it must be said, enough undeniable rizz to pull Dunst. He\u2019s also transformed physically, going on a strict intermittent fasting regimen and losing so much weight (50 pounds) that he often has to clarify that he\u2019s not on Ozempic.<\/p>\n \u201cBugonia\u201d is the first film for which he\u2019s ever seriously entered the best actor Oscars conversation. But when I ask Plemons if he\u2019s moved on to being a straight-up leading man, he turns red with embarrassment.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think about it,\u201d he says. \u201cI mean, it\u2019s funny. Teddy is technically a lead character, but he\u2019s a character<\/i>. I don\u2019t know, I\u2019m just on the screen more.\u201d<\/p>\n The film opens with Teddy (in his beekeeper suit!) fretting that humanity is heading toward the same colony collapse disorder as his bees – in which the workers, driven by toxic chemicals and a changing climate, flee because the whole system is screwed.<\/p>\n The solution is clear: He has to kidnap Michelle Fuller (Stone), the coldhearted CEO of the pharmaceuticals company, Auxolith, where he\u2019s got a job in the shipping center. She\u2019s obviously an alien recklessly experimenting on the human race – how else do you explain such wanton, immoral corporate greed? It\u2019s his chance to be a hero, to pin his sense of emasculation on some outside force.<\/p>\n \u201cI think people that have dealt with trauma, tough situations in life – there\u2019s this sort of misdirect of emotions that can happen,\u201d says Plemons.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s kind of happening a lot in the world,\u201d he continues. \u201cAnd \u2026 actually if we could face some of those feelings that are universal, that are just living in modern times, we might actually feel like we have more in common than it seems.\u201d<\/p>\n – – –<\/p>\n What struck Stone most about Plemon\u2019s performance is how he never played Teddy as a one-note raving lunatic. \u201cIt\u2019s quieter in many moments than I expected when I read the script and so well done and so realistic,\u201d she tells me by phone. \u201cI just believed him the whole way – that he was this man and that all this pain was living within him.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBugonia\u201d isn\u2019t the only auteurist film this year to shine an unflinching eye on current society. Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d is a genre-mashup skewering white nationalism and anti-immigration policies. In the thorny \u201cAfter the Hunt,\u201d director Luca Guadagnino and star Julia Roberts explore cancel culture and the #MeToo movement. Ari Aster\u2019s \u201cEddington\u201d turns small-town tensions over covid policies into a blood-spattered mess. (Aster is also a producer on \u201cBugonia.\u201d)<\/p>\n Like some of those other films, it\u2019s also inspired by the pandemic. Screenwriter Will Tracy (2022\u2019s brutal class comedy \u201cThe Menu\u201d) loosely based it on the cult-classic 2003 Korean thriller \u201cSave the Green Planet!\u201d which felt imminently adaptable to modern America.<\/p>\n Teddy in the film claims to be apolitical – having tried \u201calt-right, \u2018alt-lite,\u2019 leftist, Marxist\u201d and found all of them wanting. What\u2019s more, amid his rants, he often makes a lot of sense. \u201c<\/i>Ninety-nine point nine percent of what\u2019s called activism is really personal exhibitionism and brand maintenance in disguise,\u201d he tells Michelle.<\/p>\n \u201cI remember Will telling me \u2026 that [he was] thinking about the way people behave and interact online,\u201d says Plemons, \u201cand this sort of veil of the computer screen and the rage that comes out. Like, what if you actually put [two people of totally opposing viewpoints] in a room? That\u2019s this movie!\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s also a showcase like none other for Plemons, whom Stone calls \u201cone of the greatest actors of his generation.\u201d During one meticulously stunt-choreographed scene in which Teddy attacks Michelle at a dinner table, Stone says she was shocked at just how fully he went for it, spraying plates and spaghetti everywhere. Lanthimos loved the surprise of seeing Plemons running across the table on all fours like an insect. \u201cHow his body transforms and becomes this animal was quite lovely to watch,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Stone also tells me that she was particularly delighted by Plemons\u2019s methods to get even more<\/i> sweaty in his beekeeper suit.<\/p>\n \u201cThe whole last third of the movie, Jesse\u2019s just running,\u201d she tells me, laughing. \u201cSo before every take, he had to run around the house so he [could be] sweating and panting \u2026 Which is exhausting, but also kind of funny because if you\u2019re doing another take, [it\u2019s like], \u2018Oh, he\u2019s going for, like, a full sprint around the house.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n – – –<\/p>\n Plemons is incredibly alert, given that he\u2019s on a three-day break from shooting the Hunger Games prequel, \u201cSunrise on the Reaping,\u201d in Berlin. He\u2019s already had a cold brew and a red eye, he assures me. It\u2019s 11:15 a.m.<\/p>\n While marrying Dunst upped his name recognition, he\u2019s about to enter a new realm, as young Plutarch Heavensbee, the saga\u2019s head gamemaker secretly plotting revolution. He takes over the role from his acting idol, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose son he played in a small role in Anderson\u2019s \u201cThe Master.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a big theme in this book, about this sort of given submission to people and power and \u2026 how people can just be beaten down and brainwashed and just accept the state of the world, when we do have more power than they would like us to believe – or that we<\/i> believe,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s kind of funny, but the last three characters I\u2019ve played, they\u2019ve been some version of revolutionaries,\u201d he continues. \u201c[Plutarch] is very different from Teddy, but still trying to change the world in some way.\u201d<\/p>\n (The third character is an ensemble role in Alejandro Gonz\u00e1lez I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\u2019s untitled new film, about a rich guy who causes a disaster and then tries to make himself the savior of humanity by fixing it.)<\/p>\n The only problem with all this work is that he and Dunst, who\u2019s simultaneously opening her movie \u201cRoofman\u201d with Channing Tatum, hardly ever see each other. They got one night together in London, which is the first time Plemons says he\u2019s seen his boys in a month. Dunst recently complained, jokingly, on talk shows about them being ships in the night.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s the part of the job that does not get easier,\u201d says Plemons – though the family\u2019s coming out to Berlin soon and then they have the holidays in Austin, not too far from the small town where he grew up outside of Waco.<\/p>\n The key? Finding ways to star in things together. Most recently, in 2024, he joined Alex Garland\u2019s \u201cCivil War,\u201d because another actor dropped out and Dunst, one of the leads, asked him to step in. Plemons delivered a bone-chilling turn as a soldier who holds journalists at gunpoint in front of a mass grave, barking out the question, \u201cWhat kind of American are you?\u201d (It became a meme that friends still send him.)<\/p>\n Dunst, who got to watch from the sideline, has said she was in awe: \u201cWatching him play that role, I was like, \u2018Dang, my baby is crushing this \u2026 I was like, \u2018F—, he\u2019s a good actor.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n – – –<\/p>\n Lanthimos tells me he had his eye on Plemons for years before their schedules finally aligned and he cast him, on gut instinct, as the lead in \u201cKinds of Kindness.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s kind of an intense film to work on for the first time because he had to play three different characters in three different stories,\u201d says Lanthimos. \u201cSo that was, you know, quite a baptism.\u201d<\/p>\n Plemons, Stone and Lanthimos went straight from doing press for \u201cKinds of Kindness\u201d into shooting \u201cBugonia\u201d – a turnaround so quick that the first film was essentially rehearsal for the second.<\/p>\n The script felt so dark and relevant when he read it three years ago, Lanthimos says, \u201cso we almost had to go and make it before things got even worse than what the script entails.\u201d (Mere months after their summer shoot, United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was killed.)<\/p>\n Plemons felt the key to playing Teddy was understanding just how he\u2019d gotten to the point of believing Michelle was an alien the planet needed saving from. He began what little prep time he had with a call to one his best friends, \u201ca huge alien enthusiast\u201d named Trevor, he says. \u201cI had many conversations with him, and he was beyond excited to tell me everything.\u201d<\/p>\n He also delved into the dark corners of the internet – watching weird documentaries, reading conspiracy theories and finding particular inspiration in the YouTube series \u201cChannel 5,\u201d in which the journalist Andrew Callaghan goes to events like a Flat Earth convention or Alien Con and interviews attendees. Another helpful resource? Naomi Klein\u2019s book \u201cDoppleg\u00e4nger: A Trip into the Mirror World,\u201d which argues that covid was a major turning point in our age of polarization.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s the part of the job that I really feel grateful for,\u201d he says. \u201cMaybe in the beginning you\u2019re thinking more objectively, looking at it from the outside, but eventually you get to a place where you\u2019re just trying to understand.\u201d<\/p>\n He even has a favorite conspiracy theory: Birds Aren\u2019t Real. \u201cI think he just likes the conceit that when you\u2019re looking at a bird, it isn\u2019t real. It\u2019s a drone or something,\u201d Stone tells me. \u201cI\u2019m looking at one right now as we speak, and I know it\u2019s not real.\u201d<\/p>\n Teddy, while being \u201cone of the best characters I\u2019ve ever been asked to play,\u201d he says, lived his life in so much isolation and fear that Plemons hadn\u2019t realized how long it would take him to shake it off. He empathized for the guy, and how lonely it would feel to be screaming about a conspiracy in plain sight that no one else sees or wants to believe.<\/p>\n It\u2019s felt like a release for people to finally see what he\u2019d been carrying around for a year, he says. Even in the months since filming, the world has changed and the movie has taken on new meaning.<\/p>\n \u201cEverything just feels more extreme,\u201d says Plemons. \u201cAnd I think this dividing line is just getting more and more defined.\u201d<\/p>\n They thought they were making a movie about two polar-opposite archetypes: the raving eco terrorist and the otherworldly CEO. What\u2019s interesting, Plemons says, is that they\u2019re pretty much the same.<\/p>\n \u201cThey both have the story they\u2019re telling themselves,\u201d he says, \u201cboth thinking that they\u2019re saving the world.\u201d<\/p>\n Related Content<\/p>\n Winners and losers from the 2025 election<\/a><\/p>\n At polls, Virginia voters express concerns over top candidates<\/a><\/p>\n