There are worse ways to earn a living than promoting movies. Nobody is forcing you down a mine. Nobody is making you breathe toxic fumes. But in the axis between the autumn festival run and awards season, one can muster some sympathy for stars such as Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons.
In late August they premiered Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia at Venice International Film Festival. They were immediately bundled into a plane and flown 9,000km to Telluride, in Colorado, where they sat on directors’ chairs and chatted as if they’d just called around the corner for a cup of sugar.
Now, after further rounds of promotional hoopla, they have made it to London Film Festival and a furiously rapid conversation with your correspondent.
These days such press spots too often involve gimmicky questions from gimmicky people. You won’t get that from the Irish Times. But you will get the usual tedious wrapping ourselves in the flag. Bugonia, an ecothriller marinated in the most inventive absurdity, is the sixth film the Greek director has made with the Irish-founded production house Element Pictures. Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe, founders of the company, are again on board as producers. Stone, as she did on the Oscar-winning Poor Things, joins them in that role. Robbie Ryan, the Dublin camera bonce, is again back as cinematographer.
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“Yeah. Ed and Andrew and Robbie!” Stone drawls. “So many Irish! Yeah, Ed and Andrew? I didn’t know, until recently, their history. They have known each other most of their lives. They’re the sweetest producing duo I’ve ever met.”
Duty done, let’s trawl the new project for clues about what it might be like to live life as Emma Stone. Bugonia is a variation on a well-remembered Korean drama from 2003. Jang Joon-hwan’s Save the Green Planet! followed a young paranoiac who kidnaps a pharmaceutical chief executive convinced that the industrialist is an “Andromedan” extraterrestrial in communication with invading forces. Lanthimos’s film – named for a belief that bees generate from dead flesh – retains the interest in ecological peril but adds a very 21st-century fascination with online conspiracies.
Stone plays Michelle, the captured executive. Plemons is Teddy, the demented paranoiac. He feels he knows all about her. But what he believes is culled and expanded from unreliable information online. Stone, a star for a decade and a half, must see something of her own life in that “relationship”. (Of course, it’s really nothing of the sort.) This is how the fandom now learns about their idols.
“Yeah, it is kind of parasocial,” she says. “I guess there is an interesting commentary on that. Because it’s all over your Instagram feed. You see all of these things happening. I think it’s interesting because, growing up in middle school, people would say things about each other. That still certainly happens a lot. You jump to conclusions about other people that you don’t know.”
Yes, the modern arrangements are like a horrid and enormous expansion of high-school gossip. The whole world is jumping to the wrong conclusions by the water fountain.
“Whether it’s on the internet or it’s in person, it’s really hard to fully know someone,” she says. “You’re spending all of this time with them – people that you’re in relationships with. You get to know more and more deeply their beliefs. You know who they are and how they work. But that’s what’s so interesting about these two characters. Even though Teddy has been studying Michelle from a distance – and has these assumptions about her – she very quickly makes many assumptions about him based on these circumstances.”
Plemons and Stone, both in their mid-30s, have a bit in common. Neither is from a great coastal metropolis. Plemons was raised as the son of a firefighter in a small Texan town. Stone comes from a comfortable background in Phoenix, Arizona.
Both had acting experience as kids. Plemons was in a Coke commercial at the age of three and went on to do much extra work as a juvenile. Once a talented football player, he saw his two passions come together when cast in the NBC series Friday Night Lights. But there doesn’t seem to have been a huge breakthrough moment. For a decade or so he gradually accumulated recognition as “That Guy”. You know? The fellow who looks like a more dangerous Matt Damon. Funny in Game Night. Sinister as Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son in The Master. An Oscar nomination came in 2022 for The Power of the Dog.
We last met, in 2024, when, at Cannes, he was celebrated for his turn opposite Stone in Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness. He went on to win best actor at that festival. So he has arrived. As with Stone, a part of him now belongs to the public.
“I’m probably kidding myself, but I don’t feel like that,” he says. “I think that’s because I have a life outside of all this. I have a family, and I have other interests. I come from a small town in Texas. My dad was a fireman. My mom was a teacher. It’s not that I don’t feel incredibly fortunate to get to do something I love. I get to do projects like this that require every ounce of my creativity.”
He married his fellow actor Kirsten Dunst in 2022, and they seem to live something like a normal life. They have two children. They have little to do with the flashier side of Hollywood life. One can believe in them as working stiffs.
“I also feel like this is my job,” he says. “No matter what I did in life, my dad was always, like, ‘Whatever you do, just do it to the best of your ability.’ And that’s how I look at it. It’s probably a sort of denial – that I’m not public property.”
Stone nods along.
“My parents had a similar mentality to what Jesse is describing,” she says. “Whatever you do, do it to the best of your ability. Work as hard as you can. I don’t know what the difference would be if I wasn’t from Phoenix. There was youth theatre there!”
Stone maybe landed with a little more of a bang than Plemons. She did smart teen stuff in Superbad and Easy A. She was among the few cast members not to be Oscar nominated for The Help, in 2011. Marquee fame came when she became the latest Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spider-Man. What happened next did Stone credit. She could easily have settled into mainstream flash (not that there is anything wrong with that), but decided instead to take a more interesting route.
Playing a recovering drug addict, she was the standout among a huge ensemble in Birdman from 2014. She did Cabaret on Broadway. Then Lanthimos. The Greek director’s The Favourite involved a slight deviation away from the full-on weirdness of The Lobster and Killing of a Sacred Deer, but Stone’s turn as toady to Queen Anne was still high on eccentricity. It is hard to think who else could equal that combination of calculation and childish foot stomping.
I wonder if she was consciously seeking out more offbeat material. Was there a strategy to keep it interesting?
“I had a real moment in my mid-20s,” she says. “It felt like a pivotal moment where I got to do Birdman and I got to do Cabaret on stage. Something kind of shifted in me. If I am lucky enough to make those choices, I loved that feeling of being on a high wire. I love the complexity of the story. And then I ended up meeting Yorgos literally right after that.”
The director is taking on the quality of a mentor. He saw something untapped in Colin Farrell and cast him, to brilliant effect, in The Lobster and Sacred Deer. It was also around this time Stone won the best actress Oscar for La La Land (and that film famously didn’t quite take the best-picture prize).
“So I got to do The Favourite and La La Land and things like that,” she says. “And so that world opened up to me in a new way. I discovered the great joy of stories and characters that feel like life does to me – which is absurd and precarious and alive and funny and scary and complicated.”
You certainly got that from her performance as an abominably self-centred reality TV producer in the recent series The Curse. Few actors have so ruthlessly set into the vapidity of the entertainment industry. Not many actors at her level would agree to be so low-key – almost invisible – as she was in Ari Aster’s recent “divisive” Eddington.
Now the careering, unsettling Bugonia. The film, from a screenplay by Will Tracy, gives Stone every opportunity to demonstrate her range. Head shaved, imprisoned in a sweaty, greasy shack, Michelle tries every trick to win over Plemons’s twitching lunatic. We know her to be a ruthless, probably unscrupulous robber baroness, but Stone still manages to draw the audience’s sympathy. She is surely odds-on to get another nomination for best actress at the Oscars (though the win seems currently marked down for Jessie Buckley in Hamnet).
“They make all these conclusions about each other very quickly,” she continues, “throughout these amazing scenes that Will Tracy wrote. So it’s a fascinating thing to do, to go toe to toe with that tension.”
Stone owns the room without giving in to flamboyance. Plemons, as you might suspect from his more low-key energy on set, is a more reticent sort of fellow. He is funny but in a sense that conveys an astonishment at being placed in this position. It, perhaps, matters that his ascent was slow and steady. He may not have fully taken in what was happening to him. Perhaps he still worries it could be snatched away. Did I mention he won best actor at Cannes last year?
[ Jesse Plemons: ‘I must get some kind of sick enjoyment out of the pressure’Opens in new window ]
“You know, I forget all the time that I won best actor at Cannes,” he says, rather sweetly.
“But, in terms of security, what I love about doing this for a living is there is always another part,” he says. “I can recognise there are peaks and valleys to careers. At this point in my life I’m in a position I never imagined I would be in. I’m being asked to be a part of these films that were beyond my wildest dreams. But there’s always the next part. Each part comes with its own set of challenges. It’s its own beast that you have to figure out.”
You can’t fake this sort of amiable fatalism.
“You can bring some of what you’ve learned, but you can’t be too beholden to any of that, because it’s always its own new thing. And so that’s what’s interesting. You’re only as good as you are right now.”
Bugonia is in cinemas from Friday, October 31st
