Jesse Plemons

Jesse Plemons started as a child actor in Texas and became recognisable at eighteen as Landry Clarke on Friday Night Lights, a sweet, awkward teenager the show kept finding darker material for. The pivot came in 2012, when Breaking Bad cast him as Todd Alquist, a polite young man with no moral floor whatsoever, delivered in exactly the flat, friendly voice Landry had used. That performance contains the whole method: Plemons plays menace by declining to signal it.

Auteurs noticed. He has worked for Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Charlie Kaufman, Jane Campion and Yorgos Lanthimos, usually in supporting roles that quietly turn into the interesting part of the film. George Burbank in The Power of the Dog, a decent man out of his depth, brought an Academy Award nomination. Robert Daly in the Black Mirror episode USS Callister brought his second Emmy nomination, after the first for Ed Blumquist in the second season of Fargo, a hapless butcher who makes every situation slightly worse.

The last few years have been his best. Kinds of Kindness (2024) asked him to play three separate men in one film and won him the Cannes award for Best Actor. Killers of the Flower Moon gave him the investigator whose arrival changes the moral weather of the entire picture. He is that rare thing, a character actor who became a lead without changing a single thing about how he works.