You have to see “Bugonia” to appreciate how far out there Jesse Plemons goes with Teddy, the obsessed conspiracy freak beekeeper who kidnaps Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the CEO of Big Pharma company Auxolith, convinced that she is an alien out to destroy the earth. This week, “Bugonia” played Venice and Telluride to upbeat response from critics and audiences. It’s one of two Focus films at Telluride likely to figure in the Oscar race, along with Chloe Zhao’s “Hamnet.” Will Emma Stone and Plemons both go for lead? That is the remaining question.
All Plemons knew to begin with, he said, was what Yorgos Lanthimos told him: The movie was an adaptation of a Korean film (“Save the Green Planet!”) from the early 2000s. Plemons looked up the synopsis. Then he finished “Kinds of Kindness” (2024). Then he read the script. “Are you kidding me?” he said.
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How did it read that first time? “Like an explosion,” he said. “It was really funny. I laughed so much, I was so moved, all that range of emotions and responses. We didn’t know when we were going to do it. Maybe there was some disbelief, or I hadn’t fully allowed myself to think like I’m actually playing this part.”
Five months later, Plemons read the script again, “knowing that it was real and that it was going to happen, and maybe Yorgos had made some little adjustments at that point, but I had a very different experience reading it. It was a much heavier experience. And also I felt: ‘How am I going to do this?’ I was a little scared.”
He had never been this scared before approaching a role, because “I loved the script so much,” he said, “and I loved the part so much. To try and find my way in and do it justice was intimidating.”
Naturally, Plemons jumped down the rabbit hole of internet conspiracy theories. “It’s infinite,” he said. “Because it’s so timely, and because there are so many Teddies out there in varying degrees, most of them lesser degrees that I was, it was fascinating.”
He was seeking the odd story that “does something to you,” he said, “gets your motor running and gets you excited.”
And the screenwriter Will Tracy (“The Menu”) was also helpful. “I’m always curious how these things happen,” Plemons said, “and where they come from.”
The character Teddy starts with a specific look: Rumpled, filthy long shorts and shirts, straggly greasy long hair, scruffy beard. He’s compassionate about bees, but he’s angry at the local Big Pharma company that put his mother into a coma with an opioid recovery drug. In one scene he admits to having sampled alt-right, alt-lite, and Marxism, without finding his proper niche.
It’s intense to watch Teddy go up against the wily Fuller. He shaves her head so her fellow aliens won’t be able to trace her. He chains her to a bed in the basement. And he has his accomplice cousin (Aidan Delbis) stand guard with a rifle. When she doesn’t give him what he wants, he tortures her.
Charlie Kaufman recommended Naomi Klein’s book “Doppelganger.” “It’s a companion piece, in some ways, to ‘Bugonia,’” Plemons said. “It’s so thorough on this subject. One line is talking about the shadow self, within individuals, within nations, and this line about how the oppressed can become the oppressors resonated with me. He has this deep, deep pain.”
“Doppelganger” helped Plemons to cope with the violence. “Maybe this was a way for me to rationalize it and not judge,” he said, “but I looked at it as the way a child’s rage comes out. There’s a lot about Teddy that’s childlike. Children are magical creatures. I’ve got a four and a seven year old. Everything’s just so raw? He’s kind of brilliant, and he’s kind of dumb, and also kind of childlike; he’s easily duped.”
When he unchains Fuller, thinking that she is the empress alien, they face off in a lengthy dinner scene over spaghetti and meatballs. “The dinner scene was as much fun as you can have as an actor,” he said.
When I ask Plemons about working with the non-pro Delbis, who likes to be called autistic, he chokes up. “Talking about this movie, I get emotional,” he said. “Aidan is the MVP of the movie, his presence, him being a part of the process, and being on set and watching. I was worried in some ways, making sure that this was going to be a positive experience for him. My mother is a teacher, and for a long time she specialized in teaching children with autism and so I’ve always had a special place in my heart. What he did, it’s not easy.”
Plemons and Stone were promoting “Kinds of Kindness” when they were supposed to be rehearsing “Bugonia,” so they didn’t get as much time to play around as usual, just a few days and some fight choreography. “I wish there was more,” said Plemons. “This felt relentless. There was no opportunity to even process the scene that just happened, that took place today, because you have to look at what awful thing is coming. I didn’t know how I was going to do the third act, the endurance of that. The relentlessness probably helped, because I had to focus on what was at hand.”
Next up: In mid-September, Plemons starts the next “Hunger Games” installment, “Sunrise on the Reaping” (2026) opposite Florence Pugh. “There are a lot of parallels with the world that we’re living in now and what we’re all struggling with,” said Plemons, who plays head gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee, a role originated by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. That made Plemons hesitate for a moment. He had played Hoffman’s son in “The Master” in his early 20s. “It was one of the best classes I’ve ever taken,” he said, “because I have a few scenes with Hoffman and [Joaquin] Phoenix, but I was there for pretty much the duration of the shoot, and so I just watched.”
At this point, those of us watching Plemons are starting to believe there’s no limit to what he can accomplish.
