Dallas native Jesse Plemons won best actor at the 77th annual Cannes Film Festival Saturday for his performance in the new Yorgos Lanthimos film Kinds of Kindness.
The dark comedy, which had its world premiere at Cannes, consists of three separate stories: one about a “man without choice who tries to take control of his own life”; another about “a policeman who is alarmed that his wife who was missing-at-sea has returned and seems a different person”; and a third about “a woman determined to find a specific someone with a special ability, who is destined to become a prodigious spiritual leader,” according to a synopsis from Searchlight Pictures.
In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Plemons said he initially felt shocked and confused when reading the script.
“By the time I reached the end and finished it, I felt like I had experienced such a wide range of emotions and feelings,” he said. “My body was just on fire.”
“But then on an intellectual level, you can’t quite comprehend why or what ride you’ve just been on. But that was exciting to me.
This isn’t just a weird film for the sake of being weird. There’s something really human about it. I felt that it’s exploring issues that we all deal with but rarely look at in this way.”
The actor, who was born in Dallas and raised in Mart, a small town near Waco, plays three different roles: an amenable office employee, a cop grieving his wife’s disappearance and a bisexual cult member, Variety reported.
Since his breakout role as Landry Clarke in NBC’s Friday Night Lights, Plemons has appeared in films such as Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and TV shows including FX’s Fargo and AMC’s Breaking Bad. He also starred in HBO Max’s Love and Death, a true crime series about a North Texas woman who slayed her lover’s wife with an ax.
Kinds of Kindness will be released in select North American theaters on June 21.
Lanthimos’ previous film, Poor Things, from 2023, brought in over $100 million globally and won Best Motion Picture at the Golden Globes. The film was also a contender for Best Picture at the Oscars, but lost to Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
The cast for Kinds of Kindness also includes Willem Dafoe and Emma Stone, who collaborated with Lanthimos on Poor Things.