Jesse Plemons Discusses Superhero Inspirations for His Role in ‘Bugonia’

Jesse Plemons and Yorgos Lanthimos know people have lots to say and think about their new movie Bugonia. That’s the point.

That’s the fun part. You hope people are affected differently by a film,” Plemons says on the latest episode of Entertainment Weekly‘s The Awardist podcast. “I think those are always the types of movies that I enjoy most, the ones that stay with you that you wake up thinking about, and then when you revisit them, you might have a completely different take on it.”

The conversation around the movie started with the first trailer, when audiences learned the plot: two cousins (played by Plemons and Aidan Delbis) kidnap Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, who they believe to be an alien sent to destroy Earth. Debates over whether she might be are fun social media fodder, but Lanthimos was most interested in everything else there was to “discover and debate with yourself and others,” he says — which is part of what got his attention in writer Will Tracy’s script.

“I found it very funny. It got me excited to share it with someone, which was immediately Emma Stone, like, the same night,” Lanthimos recalls. “Just managing to combine the fact that it’s entertaining and funny, but with really profound questions and themes, interesting characters. This particular one was also felt different to me than what I’ve done before because it was so contained and so concentrated on these three characters. The Favourite was kind of the same way, too, but very different. So there’s all these elements that got me excited, and it rarely happens, to be honest.”

Plemons, who previously worked with Lanthimos on last year’s Kinds of Kindness — a three-part anthology where the cast played different characters — says he “immediately had a real love” for his Bugonia character, Teddy, a conspiracy theorist who also happens to be a beekeeper, worried that Michelle’s alien species, Andromedans, will kill off honeybees too.

“Because the script was so well written, and there are some very dark elements and aspects to Teddy, but because of the way Will wrote him, I felt it was very clear to me that Teddy had this story that he was telling himself and he told himself what role he was in this story and in his mind the fate of humanity is solely on his shoulders,” Plemons says of the character, who thinks he’s going to be the hero of this story. But, Plemons notes, “It’s tricky territory because there’s some dark scenes, but almost in the way that like a child wants to be a superhero was kind of something that I thought about.”

Plemons, a supporting actor Oscar nominee for 2021’s The Power of the Dog, is getting some of the best reviews of his 25-year career, some saying he’s at the top of his game. But did he feel like the performance was that good when it was happening?

“In my experience, if you get that feeling, you should be concerned because you’re probably wrong,” he quips.” No is the easy [answer] — like, rarely. I will say, the only days where I really feel like I can sleep easy are the ones where we’ve shot a scene so many ways [and] at the end of the day, if I’m replaying something, I think I don’t know what else I could have tried, then I find some level of peace. But that’s kind of the extent of it, because there’s no worse feeling than the drive home or eating dinner and just like, why didn’t I think of that?”

Check out more from EW’s The Awardist, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis, and our podcast diving into all the highlights from the year’s best in TV, movies, and more.

Listen to Lanthimos and Plemons’ full interview on The Awardist, below, where Plemons reveals one of his favorite scenes, Lanthimos explains how he actually got into filmmaking after initially studying business administration and playing professional basketball in Greece, and Plemons looks back on Varsity Blues and Friday Night Lights.