Jesse Plemons seems like a pretty chill guy, with nary a bad word to say about two decades’ worth of collaborators and co-stars. That equanimous vibe hit its truest testing point lately, though, when he was asked—by Entertainment Weekly‘s Awardist podcast—about one of the most infamous bits on his resumé: That part in Friday Night Lights where sweet-hearted goofball Landry beat a man to death with an iron pipe.
Introduced in the show’s second season, the Landry murder plot is, of course, infamous among FNL fans, and Plemons has been asked about it before. (Noting, all the way back in 2012, that he struggled with making the long-running story feel realistic.) Still, it’s fascinating to hear how diplomatic he can be when asked about it now, telling EW that he viewed the plotline as “a double-edged sword” because “On the one hand, I was as shocked as everyone to read that script where the comedic relief kills for love in high school. But at the same time, I don’t think I could allow myself to question it too much, because it was happening.”
Honestly, the harshest he’ll get is calling the plotline—which ultimately, in Plemons’ own words, got “swept under the rug” in the show’s next season—a “really extreme storyline that does not seem too rooted in something realistic.” And even then, he frames it as a challenge for himself, not the show’s writing team, which was gearing up for the 2007 WGA strike as the season was being filmed. Plemons says he remembered asking himself, “How am I going to not sink the show with this and try and keep it as real as everything else?” Not that there weren’t practicalities to consider, too: Plemons notes that multiple versions of the murder were attempted, saying, “I did end up killing him multiple times with bottles and then we reshot it with a pipe or something. It’s a weird, weird, weird thing we do.”
For what it’s worth, Friday Night Lights eventually moved past Landry-Hits-A-Guy-So-Hard-With-A-Pipe-That-He-Dies-Gate, with Plemons starring in four of the show’s eventual five seasons.
[via Deadline]
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