Cold-eyed malevolence doesn’t come any nastier than Jesse Plemons in Civil War. The Texas-born actor is only on screen in Alex Garland’s provocative thriller for a few minutes but leaves an indelible, utterly chilling impression. As a nameless, gun-toting vigilante in military fatigues and bright red sunglasses, he captures fully the terrifying mindset of a man who would shoot a stranger for being the wrong “kind of American” – who would think nothing of piling up corpses in a mass open grave.
“I run the gamut of terrible white guys,” Plemons joked to podcaster Marc Maron, explaining why he is so often typecast as psychotic misfits. “It’s the red hair and no eyebrows.” And typecast he is: Plemons’s characters are almost invariably people ill at ease in their own skin – the quietly spoken outsiders who often turn out to be killers or crooks. As his career has developed, it’s as if he has become Hollywood’s crown prince of dysfunctional masculinity. And he is in typically unsettling form in three separate roles in Yorgos Lanthimos’s bizarre new triptych picture, Kinds of Kindness.
Could this be the film that finally gets Plemons the mainstream recognition he deserves? It’s possible. He won the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival for his trifurcated role in Kinds of Kindness, an unexpected victory that may well have knock-on effects. But Plemons is a type arguably more associated with British cinema than with Hollywood – the chameleon-like character actor emerging as a star through the strength of his personality.