Kennedy, and I left that day thinking I was fairly relaxed,” he says. “The first day on ‘The Irishman,’ I was just listening to Pacino rant about John F. That leap of faith has since nabbed him two Emmy nominations, for “Fargo” (2016) and “Black Mirror” (2018), not to mention a memorable moment opposite screen legend Al Pacino in Martin Scorsese’s highly anticipated Netflix saga, “The Irishman.” “When you’re 19, 20, 21, there’s the willingness to jump into something without full grasping the repercussions.” “I’m not quite as hard on myself as I was when I was younger, but at the same time, there’s a nice ignorance that comes along with being young,” Plemons says, when asked how he’s evolved as an actor. It’s part of a lifelong learning process for the former child actor, one that’s only accelerated since he broke through in “Friday Night Lights.” Plemons combines precise gestures - signaling a trucker to honk with almost childlike innocence, for instance - and Todd’s earnest patter with the traumatized Jesse to create a portrait of malice so unsettling I found myself rooting for him to stick around, if only to keep things interesting. Seven years later, “El Camino” suggests the confidence that comes with experience. … I had no idea Todd was going to shoot this kid two episodes in!” “I had a few sentences from Vince to sort of base the entire character on and had to trust my instincts and hope for the best and try not to mess this show up that everyone was loving so much. “The first season, I was getting the scripts a few days in advance,” he remembers. What Gilligan failed to mention was that Plemons’ second appearance on the show, in the 2012 episode “Dead Freight,” would feature Todd shooting a preteen boy who witnesses a heist. When he was cast in “Breaking Bad,” during its bifurcated final season, Gilligan gave the actor only a short character breakdown, which Plemons, who’d never seen the series, coupled with a weeklong binge in an Albuquerque hotel room. Plemons wasn’t always privy to such information. There’s a real order, but there’s also an absolute chaos.” It’s like looking inside his brain, that apartment. This and the other details about Todd’s home life that litter “El Camino” allowed Plemons to understand the character better, he says: “Everything is so off-kilter. I’m like ‘Wow, that’s my favorite Todd moment yet.’” … I got to the sequence where I’m on our best friends road trip with the maid in the back as I’m singing along to some Dr. He uses the stage direction in a way that - he’s almost just, like, stringing you along with little bits of information. “There’s no one that writes quite like Vince. “I’d forgot what it was like to read a ‘Breaking Bad’ script,” Plemons says of his first encounter with the scene. People are pretty good at putting on a face.” “I’m drawn to characters that there’s more space to fill in and more room to explore - where it’s not so cut-and-dried. I’m amazed at how well some people I’ve known can mask their depression or whatever. You know, when you’re watching as an audience member, and you’re not quite sure how to feel about them or how they’re feeling in a certain moment? I feel like that’s how people are. “Those are the performances I’m drawn to. “I’m drawn to characters that there’s more space to fill in and more room to explore - where it’s not so cut-and-dried,” Plemons says, sitting amid the orange accents of the appropriately ranch-like Garland hotel in North Hollywood. And it’s the sort of role Plemons remains most eager to play. It is the definition of a scene-stealing performance: unexpected, profoundly strange, impossible to turn your eyes from. In “ Breaking Bad” and now “ El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie,” Plemons perfects the role, as he once described it, of “the guy that you would not expect to shoot someone.” His Todd Alquist, the cold-blooded white supremacist gang member who imprisons and tortures “El Camino’s” hero, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), also listens to yacht rock, collects snow globes and paints his apartment in perky pastels. As sidekick Landry Clarke in the high-school football drama “ Friday Night Lights,” devoted husband (and human butcher) Ed Blumquist in Season 2 of “ Fargo,” and socially awkward game developer Robert Daly in the “Star Trek”-themed “Black Mirror” episode “USS Callister,” Plemons has distinguished himself by playing the indistinguishable: unassuming fellas with a dark streak lurking within.
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