Top 13 Jesse Plemons Movies, Ranked

There’s a specific kind of unease that Jesse Plemons creates on screen — the feeling that something is slightly off even when nothing technically is. A stillness in his eyes, a measured quality to his voice that makes you lean forward trying to read him. He’s been doing it for years, quietly building one of the most interesting filmographies working today, and the TV Hulk team ranks these performances by a simple standard: how much the role stuck with us after the credits rolled, and how completely Plemons disappeared into the character. That disappearing act is harder than it looks. It requires a performer willing to strip away obvious signaling and trust the audience to feel the discomfort without being told to. From ten-minute scene-steals to full-on leading man turns, these are the films where that particular Plemons quality hit hardest.

13. Vice (2018)

Kurt is written as a device first and a person second, essentially Adam McKay’s way of winking at the audience throughout his satirical Dick Cheney biopic. Plemons plays the role with enough dry warmth that you actually want to follow this guy through the film’s chaotic structure, which is harder than it sounds when your character exists mostly to deliver exposition and meta-commentary. The late reveal about who Kurt actually is gives Jesse a genuine dramatic beat to play, and he lands it cleanly, adding a layer of melancholy that the film doesn’t entirely earn on its own. It’s a functional role, but Plemons makes it feel like more than that.

12. Black Mass (2015)

Kevin Weeks doesn’t get a flashy moment in Scott Cooper’s Whitey Bulger crime drama, and that’s kind of the point. Plemons plays him as a guy defined by loyalty, a working-class Boston kid who followed the wrong man for the right reasons, and you can watch that loyalty slowly calcify into something closer to survival instinct as the film progresses. There’s a quiet scene where Kevin processes what he’s become, and Plemons plays it with just enough internal conflict that the character lands as real rather than decorative. In a cast that includes Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton, and Benedict Cumberbatch, holding your own without a showy scene is its own accomplishment, and Jesse does exactly that.

11. Jungle Cruise (2021)

Prince Joachim might be the most fun Jesse Plemons has ever had on a movie set, and it shows in every ridiculous frame he’s in. He commits to a cartoonishly pompous German accent, keeps a pet bee as a character prop, and chews through his scenes with the kind of theatrical enthusiasm you rarely see from an actor so associated with quiet menace. The moment Joachim dramatically introduces himself aboard a submarine while completely underestimating everyone around him is pure comedy, played completely straight-faced, which makes it funnier. Jungle Cruise got mixed reviews overall, but Plemons understood the assignment better than almost anyone else in the cast: this is a theme park ride, so be the best thing on it.

10. The Irishman (2019)

Chuckie O’Brien sits in a specific emotional space throughout Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour mob epic. He’s Jimmy Hoffa’s surrogate son, fiercely devoted, and then, in the film’s most devastating stretch, implicated in something he can barely look at directly. Plemons plays that devotion as completely genuine, which makes the moral compromise land harder when it comes. Sharing scenes with Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci, Jesse never looks outmatched, bringing a lived-in authenticity that fits seamlessly into the world Scorsese constructs. The scene where Chuckie drives on the day everything changes is small and wordless, but Plemons carries the weight of it without needing a single line.

9. Bugonia (2025)

Plemons’ second collaboration with Yorgos Lanthimos gives him his first full-lead comedy role at this scale, playing a man convinced a corporation is hiding a world-ending secret inside a common housefly. That premise alone signals the kind of deadpan absurdism Lanthimos loves, and trailers show Plemons leaning into it with the same unreadable stillness he brings to dramatic work. Bugonia lands at number nine rather than higher simply because it’s too recent for a settled read on where it ultimately fits, but the comedy here runs almost entirely on that stillness — the same quality that makes him quietly menacing elsewhere becomes hilarious when applied to a man treating a housefly like a geopolitical threat.

8. Judas and the Black Messiah (2021)

Roy Mitchell never raises his voice. He doesn’t need to. Plemons plays the FBI handler who recruits and manipulates William O’Neal with a steady, pleasant professionalism that leaves every scene he’s in slightly contaminated, like watching someone smile while tightening a trap. There’s a particular moment where Mitchell reassures O’Neal over a casual meal, and Jesse delivers the lines with such practiced sincerity that you can feel exactly how this man has done this before, with other people, in other cities. In a film anchored by Daniel Kaluuya and Lakeith Stanfield’s electric performances, Plemons provides the institutional rot that explains why the whole system worked the way it did.

7. El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019)

Todd Alquist was already one of the more unsettling characters in recent television history by the time Breaking Bad ended, but the extended flashback sequences in Vince Gilligan’s follow-up film give Plemons room to do something even more specific with him. The scene where Todd cheerfully helps Jesse clean up after a murder, chatting about nothing and treating the whole thing like a minor inconvenience, is the purest distillation of what made the character so disturbing. There’s no malice in his face, just a complete absence of the moral wiring everyone else has. Seeing that performance on a cinema screen rather than a television changes the scale of it. For fans who spent years watching Todd, El Camino felt like a final, deeply uncomfortable gift.

6. Civil War (2024)

Ten minutes. That’s roughly how long Plemons is on screen in Alex Garland’s war film, and those ten minutes generated more conversation than most actors get from an entire film. His unnamed soldier, sunglasses on and standing casually beside a mass grave, asks journalists what kind of Americans they are with the flat, procedural tone of someone filling out paperwork. The horror of the scene comes entirely from how ordinary he makes it feel. Garland builds the moment carefully, but it’s Plemons who makes it land: the slight tilt of the head, the complete absence of agitation, the sense that this man has done this enough times that it no longer registers as anything unusual. It’s a scene that stays with you for days.

5. Game Night (2018)

Gary Kingsbury is the best comedic performance in a film full of them, and the secret is that Plemons never once plays him for laughs. Gary, the recently divorced cop next door who desperately wants back into the neighborhood game nights, treats every social rejection like a genuine personal tragedy, and Jesse plays each one with complete emotional sincerity. The scene where he sits uninvited on the porch, nursing his dog and his loneliness, is somehow both hilarious and a little heartbreaking. Rachel McAdams and Jason Bateman are doing great work at the center of Game Night, but audiences walked out talking about Gary, which is exactly what a supporting performance is supposed to accomplish.

4. I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020)

Jake is a character who may not exist in the way the film presents him, and Plemons has to play that ambiguity across every single scene without ever tipping his hand. He shifts from attentive and eager on the drive to his parents’ house, to defensive and strange at the dinner table, to something deeply haunted in the film’s final stretch. Each transition feels motivated even when the logic underneath it is deliberately fractured. The moment Jake recites a film monologue unprompted, with an intensity that feels both performative and devastatingly personal, is where the whole thing clicks into focus. Charlie Kaufman’s film is dense and disorienting, but Plemons is the thread you hold onto, even as you start to suspect the thread itself isn’t quite real.

3. Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

Tom White walks into Martin Scorsese’s film roughly two hours in, and the air in the room changes immediately. After sitting with Ernest Burkhart’s cowardice and William Hale’s smiling manipulation for so long, Plemons’ FBI agent arrives with a plain-spoken directness that feels almost shocking by contrast. Tom isn’t a hero in any cinematic sense, just a man who asks straightforward questions and expects honest answers, and in the context of everything that came before, that simplicity reads as almost radical. The scene where White lays out exactly what happened to the Osage people, without embellishment or evasion, is the moment the film finally exhales. Plemons does it all without grandstanding, which is precisely why it works.

2. The Power of the Dog (2021)

George Burbank is a man who loves his wife, tolerates his brother, and keeps most of what he feels somewhere you can’t quite reach. Plemons plays him with a gentleness that never tips into weakness, and in a film dominated by Benedict Cumberbatch’s ferocious Phil, George’s quiet steadiness becomes its own kind of strength. Watch the scene where George sits with Rose at the piano, not saying much, just being present. Jesse communicates an entire emotional history in the way he holds himself, the careful distance he keeps, the small gestures of care that Phil would never allow himself. Jane Campion’s film earned Plemons his first Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and it’s easy to see why: in a film about what men refuse to say, he found a way to say everything.

1. Kinds of Kindness (2024)

Yorgos Lanthimos’ anthology film gives Plemons three completely separate characters to inhabit: Robert, a man under the suffocating control of his employer; Daniel, a cop navigating something far stranger and more violent; and Andrew, caught in a different kind of devotion entirely. The challenge isn’t just playing three roles, it’s playing three roles in the same film, with the same face, without letting any of them bleed into the others. Jesse pulls it off by finding a different physical and emotional register for each one: the way Robert’s compliance sits in his shoulders, the way Daniel’s confusion shades darker, the way Andrew’s certainty carries a specific, unsettling warmth. Cannes awarded him Best Actor, one of the most prestigious prizes in world cinema, and it’s hard to argue. This is Plemons at his most fully realized, doing what he does better than almost anyone, making you feel like something is deeply wrong without ever being able to point to exactly what it is.

Jesse Plemons spent years being the most interesting person in someone else’s movie, from Landry Clarke on Friday Night Lights to Todd Alquist on Breaking Bad to Ed Blumquist in Fargo Season 2, always the one you couldn’t stop watching even when the camera wasn’t on him. Kinds of Kindness feels like the moment the movies finally caught up to what television already knew.