Jesse Plemons is revealing his hesitation about a Friday Night Lights storyline in which his character Landry committed murder.
It happened in the second season of the show when his character Landry Clarke and Adrianne Palicki’s Tyra Collette are seen talking at a gas station and Tyra is appoached by her stalker who attempts to assault her. Landry immediately comes to Tyra’s defense and smashes the guy’s head with a pipe. The stalker dies on the way to the hospital and Landry and Tyra, in a panic, then dump his body into the river.
In an appearance on Entertainment Weekly’s The Awardist podcast, Plemons said he was “pretty shocked” when the storyline was revealed.
“They didn’t tell me that something bad was gonna happen or I was going to be killed off or something, so I wasn’t worried about that,” he said. “But it was kind of 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.”
Plemons also noted that the series had a high “level of realism,” making it even harder to pull off a “really extreme storyline that does not seem too rooted in something realistic”. He said he also wondered, “How am I going to not sink the show with this and try and keep it as real as everything else?”
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Plemons also said they settled on using the pipe as a murder weapon, after trying several other options.
“I did end up killing him multiple times with bottles and then we reshot it with a pipe or something,” he said. “It’s a weird, weird, weird thing we do.”
Eventually, both Landry and Tyra were cleared of the crime and by Season 3, the plotline had been dropped.
Plemons, who can currently be seen in awards contender Bugonia, starred on all five seasons of the show, which aired from 2006-2011.