SAN ANTONIO — Fresh off of appearing in his third Best Picture nominee since 2021 with last year's "Killers of the Flower Moon," Jesse Plemons' starpower has officially gone international.
On Saturday, the 36-year-old Dallas native and rising Hollywood A-lister won the Best Actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival in France, one of the most prestigious festivals in the world and the one where Academy Awards dreams take root. Plemons was awarded for the anthology film "Kinds of Kindness," the next project from "Poor Things" director Yorgos Lanthimos that is set to open stateside June 21.
The movie received mostly strong reviews this month at Cannes, with much of the praise directed at Plemons. In its review of "Kinds of Kindness," The Hollywood Reporter called him "an actor with extraordinary range who's the standout of a stellar ensemble." Deadline's review noted that, coming on the heels off this spring's "Civil War," Plemons "is really having a moment; here, he manages to make an unappealing character, the cringing acolyte of a tyrannical boss, utterly riveting."
He didn't attend the closing ceremony in France.
Plemons' win continues a strong tradition for Texas-born actors at Cannes, which features filmmakers and performers from around the world. Just five Americans have won the Best Actor prize and three of those are Texans; Plemons joins Richardson native Caleb Landry Jones (2021's "Nitram") and San Saba-born legend Tommy Lee Jones (2005's "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada") as winners.
The other two Americans are Joaquin Phoenix (2017's "You Were Never Really Here") and Bruce Dern (2013's "Nebraska").
The top prize awarded at Cannes – the Palme d'Or – went to Sean Baker's "Anora," a comic but devastating Brooklyn odyssey about a sex worker who marries the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch. Coralie Fargeat's body horror film "The Substance," starring Demi Moore as a Hollywood star who goes to gory extremes to remain youthful, won Best Sreenplay. And Best Actress went to an ensemble of actors: Karla Sofía Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz for Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Perez,” a Spanish-language musical about a Mexican drug lord who transitions to a woman.
Whether Plemons' Cannes win signals an eventual Oscar nomination in several months remains to be seen; he has already been nominated once before, in the Best Supporting Actor category for Jane Campion's Western "The Power of the Dog." The last time a Best Actor winner at Cannes went on to be nominated at the Oscars was 2019, when Antonio Banderas collected a nod for "Pain and Glory."