Jesse Plemons joins Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro in Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon

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Jesse Plemons is getting back into uniform for his next project.

The erstwhile Breaking Bad and Fargo star has joined the cast of Killers of the Flower Moon, the next film from director Martin Scorsese, alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. This marks Plemons' second collaboration with the Oscar-winning filmmaker, after appearing in Scorsese's previous film The Irishman.

Based on the 2017 book by author David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon follows the serial murders of Native Americans of the oil-wealthy Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma. Plemons will play Tom White, the lead FBI agent investigating the killings. Lily Gladstone (First Cow, Billions) was also recently cast as Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman married to Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio), the nephew of a powerful local rancher (De Niro).

Flower Moon is set to begin filming in the spring, after delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Apple TV+ came on board to finance and stream the film last year, after Paramount Pictures balked at the hefty production budget (allegedly in the $200 million range) that Scorsese wanted. (Paramount will still release the film theatrically.) The Hollywood Reporter's Kim Masters also reported that the studio was unhappy with revisions DiCaprio and Scorsese made to the script, which shifted DiCaprio from the FBI agent role to the darker character of Burkhart, "torn between love and the evil machinations of his uncle."

Screenwriter Eric Roth later confirmed that he and DiCaprio clashed over the script. "They'll be continuing rewrites with that," Roth said of the film on a November 2020 episode of the Scriptnotes podcast. "Leonardo wanted some things changed that we argued about. He won half of [the arguments]. I won half of them."

Coincidentally, Plemons also played an FBI agent in Judas and the Black Messiah, currently streaming on HBO Max. His upcoming projects include Disney's Jungle Cruise alongside Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt, and Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog opposite Benedict Cumberbatch and Kirsten Dunst.

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