Jesse Plemons: ‘Gaining weight messed me up a bit’

The actor who terrified us in ‘Breaking Bad’ and the recent ‘Civil War’ talks to Louis Chilton about working with Robert De Niro in Netflix’s ‘Zero Day’, flubbing his audition for ‘Star Wars’, and child acting. Imagine, if you will – what historians might call counterfactual thinking – a world in which Jesse Plemons, the actor who played Breaking Bad’s most chilling character, was one of the faces of the Star Wars sequel trilogy. If certain reports were to be believed, this very nearly happened. But maybe they weren’t to be believed. “Oh God,” Plemons tells me, grimacing. “I went in, gave a terrible audition. I had no idea what I was doing... it was just these scenes without any context. [Director] JJ Abrams was really nice, but I was spiralling.”.

In hindsight, it’s probably a good thing that Plemons – then fierce with the heat of his Breaking Bad role as the violent, empathy-free pest-exterminator turned meth cook Todd – never got too close to that galaxy far, far away. There’s something about Plemons that’s too credible for something as extraterrestrial as Star Wars – a rare and offbeat verisimilitude. Put him in a Star Wars movie, and you might have people running out of the cinema mid-scene just to check for themselves that they are safe; that a Death Star is not, in fact, hovering menacingly above the horizon.

And besides, the run of projects that followed that rejection, from prestige TV hits (Fargo) and intimate dramas (Other People) to substantial Oscar-winners (The Power of the Dog; Judas and the Black Messiah) established him as one of the most sought-after character actors around. Just ask Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, or Yorgos Lanthimos.

I am sitting with Plemons on a grey February afternoon, in a small hotel room overlooking the streets of central London. The 36-year-old is dressed sharply – herringbone coat, jean shirt and boots, his hair worn long and swept back. Early in his career, Plemons would often be likened to a young Matt Damon, but the truth is there’s no mistaking him for anyone else. He has one of those inimitable larger-than-life faces: narrow, mercurial eyes, and a wide, taut hammock of a grin.

He’s looking lean, too. There has, in fact, been a marked change to his body over the past few years. “It is one of the many strange things about this job,” he says, slowly. “I first gained weight for Black Mass,” he explains – the 2015 crime film in which Plemons played real-life mafioso Kevin Weeks opposite Johnny Depp’s Whitey Bulger. “I never imagined getting to play a part like that. [Gaining weight] was a decision I made at that age, given that opportunity for that director – and I was playing a real person. I don’t regret it. But it was very easy to put the weight on, and much more difficult taking it off. I don’t know if it’s something I would do again – because it did mess me up a bit.”.

He pauses, then goes on. “I felt like that decision I made sort of dictated the types of parts I was being asked to play, and then started to seep into my own identity... which wasn’t necessarily who I was before that.”. It took getting cast in Civil War, Alex Garland’s 2024 dystopian thriller, for Plemons to lose weight, through fasting and lifestyle changes. (He appears in just one sequence, as a soldier bent on killing strangers according to how “American” he perceives them to be – being the wrong “kind of American” brings execution.) “Being asked to play that character and being unable to see him at my current weight... that kind of snapped me out of it,” he says. “As well as having young kids. And I just got a handle on it again. Having lost the weight, aside from feeling better, it does feel like I’ve opened another door to potential parts I can play.”.

Plemons’s threatening bit part was the most talked-about sequence in Civil War. Garland’s provocative story follows roaming war journalists in an imagined near-future: the US is in the death rattle of a fascist president’s third term, with the ideologically divided nation having erupted into violent conflict. The parallels with the contemporary US are many and glaring. It’s a similar state of affairs in Zero Day, a six-part thriller just released on Netflix, which touches on a range of fraught, ripped-from-the-headlines ideas: a US president with cognitive impairment; the surveillance state; warped conspiracist content-mongers; cyberterrorism.

“With a lot of the projects I’ve been working on of late, the parallels [with reality] are kind of undeniable,” Plemons says. “But for actors, there’s always this hyperfocus on the characters, the relationships – the human aspects of it. If other people draw those conclusions, great.”.

Plemons has a habit of stroking his chin when in thought, flashing the faded tattoo on the inside of his finger. It reads “TVZ” – meaning Townes Van Zandt, the brilliant and troubled singer-songwriter (and fellow Texan) who died back in 1997. Van Zandt sang about misfits, misanthropes, people in love – it’s easy to guess why his music resonated with Plemons, who has made a career out of playing unconventional men.