'Breaking Bad... I feel like I still haven't lived that down'

Jesse Plemons talks to Louis Chilton about working with Robert De Niro in Netflix’s Zero Day’, flubbing his audition for Star Wars, and how certain roles have shaped his identity

- Louis Chilton

Imagine, if you will - what historians might call counterfactual thinking - a world in which Jesse Plemons, the actor who played Breaking Bad's most chilling character, was one of the faces of the Star Wars sequel trilogy. If certain reports were to be believed, this very nearly happened. But maybe they weren't to be believed. “Oh God,” Plemons tells me, grimacing. “I went in, gave a terrible audition. I had no idea what I was doing... it was just these scenes without any context. [Director] JJ Abrams was really nice, but I was spiralling.”

In hindsight, it’s probably a good thing that Plemons – then fierce with the heat of his Breaking Bad role as the violent, empathy-free pest-exterminator turned meth cook Todd – never got too close to that galaxy far, far away. There’s something about Plemons that’s too credible for something as extraterrestrial as Star Wars – a rare and offbeat verisimilitude. Put him in a Star Wars movie, and you might have people running out of the cinema mid-scene just to check for themselves that they are safe; that a Death Star is not, in fact, hovering menacingly above the horizon.

And besides, the run of projects that followed that rejection, from prestige TV hits (Fargo) and intimate dramas (Other People) to substantial Oscar-winners (The Power of the Dog; Judas and the Black Messiah) established him as one of the most soughtafter character actors around. Just ask Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, or Yorgos Lanthimos.