(Credits: Focus Features)
Sat 15 November 2025 21:15, UK
It has been a pretty steady ascent for Jesse Plemons to the top of the movie industry. Despite still being just 37, he’s been going for some time now, all the way back to 2008’s sports drama Friday Night Lights as a 19-year-old, in fact. But although it’s tough to pinpoint exactly when he did it, he is definitely now one of Hollywood’s leading talents.
Personally, I first noticed him in Black Mirror’s USS Callister, the award-winning, top-3 episodes, Star Trek/video game mash-up that made most people go ‘wait, is that Matt Damon?’ and then realise it definitely wasn’t, but that whoever it was, he was brilliant.
But then I was obviously late to the party, because by then he’d already been in the best TV show of all time (™), Breaking Bad, plus the spin-off movie El Camino, and been Emmy-nominated for his work on FX’s Fargo in 2015.
His abilities were obviously being noticed by the very best in the game by that point, and after Black Mirror brought him another Emmy nomination, he began to work with some genuine luminaries (although he had done a Spielberg movie by then) as Martin Scorsese cast him in the epic Netflix production The Irishman with Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.
In the last five years, Plemons has gone on to get considerable acclaim, including an Oscar nomination for Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, which, I’m sorry, is one of the most boring films ever to win ‘Best Picture.’ He has also become a favourite of Pretty Things director Yorgos Lanthimos, appearing in the fairly bizarre Kinds of Kindness with Emma Stone, and again with the Oscar-winner in Bugonia, which has just been released.
(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
If you want to see Plemons at his absolute best, however, and you haven’t yet seen it, then his performance in Alex Garland’s 2024 movie Civil War is quite something. His time on screen represents some of the tensest cinema of recent years, and he basically steals the entire film in about three minutes.
One role he hasn’t yet taken on, but would love to, is a real-life one, namely a retelling of the story of Duane Allman, the guitar virtuoso from The Allman Brothers Band who blazed a trail across popular rock music in the late 1960s before dying at just 24. Aside from founding and playing with his own band, he also lent his unparalleled slide skills to the Eric Clapton group Derek and the Dominos for their best-selling album Layla.
Asked by Variety which person he’d most like to play in a movie, Plemons said: “Duane Allman of The Allman Brothers Band. He was the best slide guitar player this world has seen, and he also has red hair so it would work!”
Plemons would indeed visually suit the role, especially now he has had what is known on the internet as a ‘glow up’, losing a fair bit of weight and growing his hair much longer than previously. A Duane Allman biopic has yet to see the light of day, although all the ingredients are certainly there, a unique talent, a murdered father, heroin and cocaine abuse and a tragically early end.
Plemons, meanwhile, will have a busy 2026 too; he’s working on the latest Hunger Games instalment and a movie with Birdman director Alejandro G. Iñárritu that’s as yet untitled.
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