After revealing that he felt sick to his stomach while reading the script for Kinds of Kindness, Jesse Plemons says some audience members may feel the same way when they sit down to watch the Yorgos Lanthimos film.
The movie is split into three separate stories — about a man who tries to break free from his predetermined path, a policeman whose wife seems like a different person after her return from a supposed drowning, and a woman who searches for someone prophesied to become a spiritual guide — as stars Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Joe Alwyn, Hong Chau and Mamoudou Athie play different roles in each story.
Plemons told the L.A. Times that he felt sick reading the script, and at the film’s New York premiere on Thursday, elaborated, “There are some sequences in that that I feel like would make a lot of people sick to their stomachs.”
“It’s also a type of movie that I feel like you don’t get to see all that often nowadays, that is very strange and surreal and abstract and dream-like, nightmarish, but it isn’t, in my opinion, weird just for the sake of being weird,” the actor continued. “Yorgos has this way of taking these really universal, simple themes and sort of turning them on their head and exploring them in really strange but really human ways. So I found it really emotionally charged reading the script but couldn’t exactly articulate why or what had just happened to me reading the script.”
Plemons also had plenty of praise for co-star Stone, calling her “fearless and obviously extremely talented in so many ways,” noting that after four films together, the actress and director “have obviously found this amazing partnership. She takes the work very seriously but doesn’t take herself seriously, which I find nice and refreshing.”
Lanthimos added that after The Favourite, Bleat and Poor Things, he and Stone keep collaborating because “we get along as people and we want to spend time together and we’ve become very good friends. That helps a lot in figuring out how we want to work and being able to trust one another and explore areas that we normally wouldn’t explore.”
Dafoe, who just worked with the pair on Poor Things, said, “I love working with both of them and [these are] both really different movies but both really good experiences.” Alwyn, who appeared in The Favourite, echoed, “It’s always nice to return to working with people that you know and Emily [Stone] is no different to that. Emily and Yorgos, [cinematographer] Robbie Ryan, to see the same faces again. There’s familiarity there, there’s trust, there’s friendship; it makes a big difference and it’s really, really lovely.”
Kinds of Kindness hits select theaters Friday.
Neha Joy contributed to this report.
