Reddit Played a Role in Defining Jesse Plemons’ Suspicious ‘Bugonia’ Character

Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Bugonia is a remake of Let’s save the green planet!although in many ways it is much less available than the 2003 South Korean original. And while the basic premise — a conspiracy theorist kidnaps a powerful leader he believes to be an alien planning to destroy Earth — is the same in both films, the nuances of what a conspiracy theorist looks and acts like have been changed to serve the purpose. an American version, around 2025, of this story.

In a new interview with Deadline, Bugonia screenwriter Will Tracy played the character of Teddy, played with just the right nervous, damaged but determined energy by Jesse Plemons. Some of his most useful research came from simply visiting websites that Teddy himself could bookmark and return to.

“I spent some time [Reddit]and maybe not even for researching the film. [Because of] “My own weird search for knowledge and answers or something like that, or some confusion, or maybe a need to understand what people are saying, to feel connected to something…I find myself kind of diving into these neighborhoods anyway, as an observer,” Tracy said. “So I did quite a bit of commentary on Reddit and YouTube, and even a little bit of 4Chan, which was pretty hot at the time, but to some extent I didn’t want to make Teddy some kind of composite of those, whatever the troubles of the day were, I wanted to make a guy who felt like he had his own thing. Even ‘Incel,’ which seems culturally valid to call him that, in some ways, well, he literally isn’t, he’s voluntarily Single. He is very determined in this sense.

He continued. “I think the other thing that I probably had in mind was, and this has definitely been reinforced since then with some recent events, but every time there’s a thing like this, whether it’s a domestic terrorist or some shooter, or an assassin, or whatever, there’s now, of course, this immediate cultural reaction to sort of assign responsibility to the other side for this, like, ‘He’s one of them,’ or “It’s clearly a right-wing nut job,” or, “He’s a left-wing nut job.” And then, of course, we look at what happens, inevitably, the cliché, which always seems to happen, is that the information comes in and says, “These are gun-loving anti-fascist Republicans who identify as non-binary.”

“And so that was kind of in my head too, that this is someone who maybe went through a bunch of different things and didn’t find a story that appealed to him, and so he had to create his own.”

Of course, in Teddy’s case, his crazy ideas are actually correct. Emma Stone’s character, Michelle, is ultimately revealed to be an alien. Trying to decide whether or not Teddy is dangerously unstable — or whether Michelle is indeed plotting the planet’s demise — is a big part of the fun of the film. The fact that Teddy feels so alarming accurate only heightens that mystery, especially when you discover the truth at the end.

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