Being a child actor is a tricky profession. For every Anna Paquin or Ryan Gosling, there are countless other young thespians whose names have been lost to the unforgiving ravages of the audition process. For Jesse Plemons, his Hollywood career started when he was an extra in a Coca-Cola commercial. Thirty years later, he’s still working, and has gone from utility player to leading man. In 2022, as he takes on the role of a billionaire husband in Windfall, one thing rings true when you see Plemons’ name in the credits: For the next little while, you’re in good hands. 

Though his character doesn’t have a name, Plemons plays a snotty tech billionaire trapped in a hostage situation with his wife (Lily Collins). In another actor’s hands, it might be a role that could tiptoe into the clichéd: a wealthy and unpleasant jerk with few redeeming qualities. But Plemons imbues it with an unpredictable, willfully strange energy. He giggles frantically when the home invader (Jason Segel) asks for $3 million, and responds to a threat of violence with a childish cowboy impression of a gun going off. 

The Windfall billionaire is a far cry from Plemons’ breakout role as nerdy freshman Lance in Friday Night Lights. There, Plemons melted into the background — a pleasant, charming fixture of the scenery. When he popped up on Breaking Bad a few years later, he channeled that same unassuming presence into one of the most hateable characters on TV. As Todd, Plemons is agreeable and unmemorable, until he explodes in a burst of taciturn violence and becomes a casually frightening threat. The performance — and a young Plemons’ vague resemblance to Matt Damon — led to him being coined “Meth Damon” by the Internet, a diminutive nickname for an actor who deserved far more credit for his work.

Everett Collection

Plemons continued to turn in small, eye-catching performances over the next few years, in films as wide-ranging as Tom Cruise’s American Made, The Discovery (also directed by Windfall filmmaker Charlie McDowell) and two Steven Spielberg movies, Bridge of Spies and The Post. But he really popped in 2018’s Game Night, as a police officer who’s either a complete sociopath or just an awkward neighbor. That line is one Plemons treads often; he’s uniquely accomplished at playing characters who don’t quite fit in, in a way that might be sinister or might be just a little lonely.

Plemons’ first major starring role came in Charlie Kaufman’s surreal, spiraling 2020 nightmare I’m Thinking of Ending Things. It’s a nearly impossible role, a psychological road trip through the heart of a relationship on its last legs. Plemons and Jessie Buckley (The Lost Daughter) play a couple on a snowy drive to meet Plemons’ parents, and things get deeply weird and existentially terrifying from there. To say any more would spoil the surprise of Plemons’ performance here, which carefully threads the needle between Kaufman’s heady script and Plemons’ own stolid, accessible style. It’s the perfect transition point to this new, bigger phase of his career; not long after, he’d be nominated for an Oscar for The Power of the Dog, alongside his partner — on-screen and in life — Kirsten Dunst. Plemons isn’t the lead of The Power of the Dog, but his performance is crucial to the film’s power. As put-upon brother George, his melancholy performance is pivotal to our understanding of Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), the taciturn rancher whom the film revolves around. 

But perhaps the clearest indicator of where Plemons’ career is headed comes in the two films in which he starred in 2019. The first, Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, was a small but scene-stealing role as Al Pacino’s son. Here, Plemons gets a break from playing sinister or solitary. His big scene, a comic palate cleanser in the bleak third act, comes just before the film’s saddest moment. Plemons is serving as chauffeur for two hitmen, and his car smells like fish. The lion’s share of his dialogue is devoted to explaining the situation: He was picking up a fish for a friend, and no, he didn’t wrap the fish, and no, he doesn’t know what kind of fish it was. The scene drags on hysterically long, a tenuous balancing act between breaking the film’s tension with humor and building it back up again with time. Plemons does his job here, and does it well. The next time he’ll be in a Scorsese film, it will be as the protagonist.

Plemons has followed that arc before on a more microscopic level. In his second 2019 film, El Camino, he reprised the role from Breaking Bad that briefly made him notorious. Todd, so threatening in the backdrop of the original show, is here elevated to the status of second lead, forming a perverse buddy-movie dynamic with Aaron Paul’s Jesse. Plemons has visibly aged since the end of Breaking Bad, but he slips into the role as if he never left it — a gentle, menacing expansion on a character never intended for the spotlight. He fills in the edges of Todd’s thinly sketched-out villainy, giving us a glimpse at his interior life with the same specificity he does in Windfall. It’s an effective analogue for the path Plemons’ own career has taken, from the deep background to center stage.