Warning: Major SPOILERS lie ahead for Bugonia!Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons’ game of mental chess comes to a shocking end in Bugonia, and one of the team’s figures thinks Plemons’ character was in the right. The remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s Save the Green Planet! revolves around Plemons’ Teddy Gatz and his cousin Don as they kidnap powerful CEO, Stone’s Michelle Fuller, in the hopes of exposing her as the leader of an alien race intent on destroying Earth.
Across its 118-minute runtime, the film largely leads viewers to believe that Teddy is mentally unstable and a fanatacist in his conspiratorial beliefs, indicating it stemming from his mother becoming comatose after being a test subject for Michelle’s pharmaceutical company, as well as being sexually abused by a local police officer. However, Bugonia‘s ending pulls the rug out from everyone when it’s revealed Michelle is indeed an alien, viewing humanity as an experiment, and kills everyone.
Ahead of the movie’s release, Joe Deckelmeier interviewed Luca Guadagnino, Will Tracy, Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons for ScreenRant to discuss Bugonia. The writer, known for his prior work on The Menu and Succession, explained that one of his biggest goals with the film was to “get people in a room from opposite ends of an extreme cultural divide and just examine the emotional biases“ they hold in looking at each other:
Will Tracy: Ideas about what they think the world is, the idea of reality that they’ve created, and how we’ve all been left alone a little bit to create our own realities — maybe because what’s being told to us by the powers that be often isn’t very inspiring or convincing.
This subsequently led to him revealing that he largely believes Teddy was right by Bugonia‘s ending. In his approach to writing the character, he felt that “I don’t really judge very harshly” someone who has gone through the life experiences Teddy has, particularly given the conclusions he reaches for his theories are because “he’s not really been given a better story to believe in“.
Citing that he believes many of Teddy’s ideas “are correct“, Tracy further shared that his hope in crafting the character and his place in the film’s story was to not focus “so much on his madness“, but instead rather “the clarity underlying his mad decision-making“.
Plemons similarly felt that the best way to portray his Bugonia character was to think about “how Teddy views himself and the story that he’s telling himself“. Acknowledging that much of his core personality is the “many theories and convictions that he believes“, the Oscar nominee found that Teddy is “the hero of humanity” in his character’s mind, and is “the protector of the little things“:
Jesse Plemons: He has all this love for creatures and people that are stepped on and overlooked, so that was really helpful to me. I think we all have this version of how we see ourselves, and Teddy’s is just maybe a little more extreme in the actuality of his situation and what he’s telling himself.
Luca Guadagnino Had The Perfect “Troupe” Of New & Familiar Faces Going Into Bugonia
ScreenRant: Yorgos, you’ve talked about wanting to challenge what certain people think about. How does Bugonia push that idea even further in a world where everyone seems convinced that what they’re doing is right?
Yorgos Lanthimos: You said a lot of the things that I could have said just by asking the question. This film has the perfect structure to make the audience doubt what they think and what they believe, minute after minute. It’s this uncovering of layers of these characters and their beliefs, their ways of trying to convince each other or themselves, that engages the audience in a very unique way. I think there’s a very interesting course that you take while watching the film, which tells a lot of things about you as well.
ScreenRant: Yorgos, you’ve worked with Emma Stone several times and Jesse Plemons twice, back-to-back. What is it about the two of them, individually or together, that make them such powerful collaborators?
Yorgos Lanthimos: I think it’s as simple as finding someone you get along with and, of course, appreciate greatly as a talent. You trust them and build on the relationship afterward, so it allows you to not be afraid to go to places that you might not have gone if it were someone that you didn’t know so well or couldn’t rely on. They’re both incredible actors, and they have great chemistry. With Jesse, it was almost like making three films back-to-back when we made Kinds of Kindness. It was three different stories, and he had to play three different characters, so it felt like there was already a troupe created. I work a lot with a lot of the same people in terms of the crew as well, but there’s always some new people, like with Aidan [Delbis], who plays the role of Don. And this was my first time working with Will, so it changes the dynamic a little bit and pushes us forward. But also, there are relationships that are strong and evolve, and they are also a very important part of the process.
The Movie Gave Stone & Plemons A Chance To Think Of Something Different While Filming
ScreenRant: Emma, Michelle starts off as this high-powered CEO who thinks she’s in total control, but the movie slowly starts stripping all that away. What was most interesting to you about showing those cracks under her armor?
Emma Stone: It was the first time that I had ever thought about approaching a character where I thought a good deal about the audience in general. Because you try not to think too much about how people are going to react to something, but more than that, I wondered what they would think if they saw it a second time. That was really an interesting new world for me to think about, “Okay, if someone were to be watching this for a second time, would this all make sense?” And then I would [adjust]. So, I was going very outside-in, in a new way — which I guess makes sense for the character who is very outside-in.
ScreenRant: Aidan Delbis brings such a different rhythm compared to the two of you, and it almost changes the temperature of the movie when he’s in a scene. How did that dynamic help you find new shades of your own performance?
Jesse Plemons: I think there are really four main characters in this movie — five, if you want to include Mom, who pops in and out. But Aidan is just such an interesting person, and I think what makes his performance so interesting is his perspective, and the fact that he has done some plays in his high school theater and loves horror movies. In a lot of ways, it made a lot of sense for him to kind of enter into this world. He’s just a really self-assured, curious person, and I think he added something to this movie that completely elevates it. Yeah, he did bring this very alive energy to all these scenes, and he improvised a couple of moments that were really exciting.
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Bugonia is now in theaters.
- Release Date
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October 31, 2025
- Runtime
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118 minutes
- Director
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Yorgos Lanthimos
- Writers
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Will Tracy, Jang Joon-hwan
- Producers
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Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe, Emma Stone, Lars Knudsen, Miky Lee, Ari Aster, Jerry Kyoungboum Ko